For some reason a Twitter thread by David Frum was making the rounds yesterday.
In it, Mr. Frum was decrying right-wing fake news about Dr. Fauci.
Which is sort of funny since Mr. Frum was one of the people who lied us into the Iraq war. You don't get much more right-wing fake news than that.
His title in the George Bush administration was 'speechwriter' which would be bad enough, crafting the words for the President to say regarding the decision to invade. And then stay. But he was actually more than that. Frum sat at the table with Bush, his chief-of-staff and others, the absolute highest levels of the administration, to create the entire propaganda effort, not just the speeches but the whole package.
Frum is now at The Atlantic with another of the folks who lied us into that war, the Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg. We appended a quick outro on Frum in August's "Today I Learned: That The Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic Was One Of The People Who Lied Us Into The Iraq War":
....Mr. Goldberg has on his Atlantic staff a guy named David Frum, a neocon former Bush speechwriter who never met a war he didn't like, as long as it was someone else's sons and daughters getting killed and maimed. We'll have more on him and Goldberg as the debacle in Afghanistan unfolds.....
I still have to get around to the Frum post but in the meantime here is Glenn Greenwald's Outside Voices page at his substack on what looks like a coordinated corporate media campaign to dissimulate; and battle straw men, to protect the head of NIAID (since 1984!) at the National Institutes of Health. Which campaigns often seem to be attempts to get in front of stories that are about to break.
On that last point, we shall see.
Via Mr. Greenwald's substack, December 1:
As public anger grew over gruesome and medically useless dog experiments funded by Fauci's agencies and budgets, his media allies came to the rescue with a pack of lies.
NOTE FROM GLENN GREENWALD: Earlier this month, I reported that The Washington Post was preparing a hit piece on a group that it had long praised: the White Coat Waste Project, devoted to the singular mission of building an ideologically diverse coalition to oppose wasteful and morally reprehensible taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs and other animals. As I noted there, The Post — after years of heaping praise on this group as a rare Washington success story in uniting left and right around a common noble cause — was now working to create the exact opposite narrative: namely, that the group was driven by some sort of clandestine MAGA or pro-Trump agenda, which meant its work should be regarded as unreliable and that it is denouncing animal experimentations not out of a sincere devotion to the cause but only to undermine the sacred-to-liberals Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose agencies and budgets fund these experiments (that White Coat has been working against government experimentations on dogs for many years, long before Fauci became a political lightning rod, was no impediment to the Post's smear job, because, as is so often the case these days, its mission was political and not journalistic).
As predicted, The Post, on November 19, published their attack on White Coat. Its pro-Fauci mission could not have been more obvious, beginning with the headline: “Fauci swamped by angry calls over beagle experiments after campaign that included misleading image: Little known animal-rights group leverages hostility among conservatives toward U.S. covid chief." The article also noted that I had weeks earlier revealed what they were up to, blaming our reporting here for fueling further criticisms of Dr. Fauci, as if doing that — exposing the bad acts of a powerful political official like Fauci — is something a journalist should avoid doing.
The Washington Post, "Fauci swamped by angry calls over beagle experiments after campaign that included misleading image: Little known animal-rights group leverages hostility among conservatives toward U.S. covid chief,” Nov. 19, 2021That Post article, along with similar ones from corporate outlets that emerged, sought to depict White Coat and the conservative and independent media outlets covering this story as engaged in a “misinformation” campaign. But as noted in the below Outside Voices article we are publishing today by Leighton Woodhouse — who has been covering this story from the start — it is The Post and Fauci's defenders who are disseminating blatant disinformation, with the barely concealed motive of protecting Fauci at all costs, even if it means burying this vital story about the ethically horrendous acts of the government in the name of science.
As is true with all of the Outside Voices freelance articles that we publish here, we edit and fact-check the articles to ensure factual accuracy, but our publication of it does not necessarily mean we agree with all or even any of the views expressed by the journalist, who is guaranteed editorial freedom here. Following Woodhouse's article below, you can watch the video player to see the segment I did last night on Fox News with Tucker Carlson regarding this article and the corporate media's dishonest attempts to protect Fauci, as illustrated by The Post's dishonest hit piece.
By Leighton Woodhouse
By now you’ve surely heard about Anthony Fauci and his laboratory beagles, but in case you haven’t, it goes like this: For forty years, Fauci, as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has funded gruesome experiments on animals. Beagles in particular are one of the favored species for these experiments, because of their docile and people-pleasing nature, which makes for less hassle for the humans who subject them to pain and suffering. In one of these NIAID-funded experiments, in Tunisia, sedated beagles’ heads were put into mesh bags with swarms of starved sand flies, who fed on the live dogs.
The other thing you may have heard is that the story is just another right-wing conspiracy theory. You may have heard this from The Washington Post, from any of a number of self-proclaimed “fact checkers,” or maybe even from the globally renowned Beacon of Honesty David Frum of The Atlantic.
I’ve been reporting on this story for the past few weeks. In fact, I’ve been reporting it as closely as anyone, if not more so. It’s been an extremely educational experience for me, but not because I was unfamiliar with the industry of animal experimentation, or NIAID’s leading role within it. What’s been educational is seeing up close and first-hand how the mainstream media constructs and deploys a brazen misinformation campaign.
First of all, just to get this detail out of the way: the story is true. As head of NIAID, the second biggest institute within the National Institutes of Health, Anthony Fauci has spent billions of dollars over four decades funding scientific experiments on animals, many of them stomach-turning. NIAID does not deny this. In fact, the published scientific papers that describe these heinous experiments routinely credit NIAID and NIH as their funders, and sometimes as direct collaborators. You can look them up yourself: here are just a few of them....
....MUCH MORE
Experimenting on dogs is nasty business, but I think it is a diversion from the key issues:
The virus was the result of research funded by Fauci at the Wuhan Institute of Virology using Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance to get around U.S. prohibitions.
Here's the now infamous video clip of Daszak on March 28, 2016 describing his 'Colleagues In China' Manipulating Viruses. Here's the transcript:
....IT IS NOT STRAIGHTFORWARD. FIRST OF ALL, WE ARE ONLY LOOKING AT VIRAL FAMILIES THAT INCLUDE THOSE THAT HAVE GOTTEN TO PEOPLE FROM ANIMALS.
WE HAVE NARROWED IT DOWN FROM THERE. THEN, WHEN YOU GET A SEQUENCE, AND IT LOOKS LIKE A RELATIVE TO THE KNOWN NASTY PATHOGEN, JUST LIKE WE DID WITH SARS -- WE FOUND VIRUSES IN BATS. SOME OF THEM LOOKED VERY SIMILAR TO SARS. WE SEQUENCED THE SPINE PROTEIN, THE PROTEIN THAT ATTACHES TO CELLS,
AND THEN YOU CREATE PSEUDO-PARTICLES, INSERT PROTEINS FROM THE VIRUSES THAT COMBINED TO HUMAN CELLS. EACH STEP OF THIS, YOU MOVE CLOSER AND CLOSER TO COULD THE VIRUS BECOME PATHOGENIC IN PEOPLE?
YOU NARROW DOWN THE FIELD. YOU REDUCE THE COST, AND END UP WITH A SMALL NUMBER OF VIRUSES THAT REALLY DO LOOK LIKE KILLERS. AND YOU LOOK AT THE PEOPLE, AND THE PEOPLE IN THE REGION THAT LIVE WHERE THE ANIMAL LIVES, DO WE...
After the virus escaped from the lab, Fauci directed the cover up of its origins and by doing so—I mean he's still, as recently as last week, talking about shutting down 'wet markets'—wasted weeks and months of other researchers efforts to understand what they were dealing with.
Contrary to the old saying, It is the crime BUT It is also the coverup.
