lgadmin

Townhall

Plato is the most well-known student of Greek philosopher Socrates, who lived and taught in the fourth century B.C. In his famous treatise The Republic, Plato presents the concept of a “noble lie” as a myth that “would have a good effect, making [the people] more inclined to care for the state and one another.” In other words, the “noble lie” was one that served the purpose of the “greater good.” It still was a lie, but considered acceptable because the intentions of its purveyor were noble.

Socrates and Plato were philosophers, not scientists, but their notion of the “noble lie” continues today as a predicate for myriad public policy pronouncements.

Our contemporary chieftain of the “noble lie” is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the oft self-proclaimed “scientist” who has led our country into the COVID-19 pandemic morass for more than two years based on repeated noble lies.

Sadly, the “noble” Dr. Fauci presents more as the Emperor With No Clothes than a noble philosopher-scientist.

When Fauci first laid his foundational noble lie before the public – that masks were ineffective against COVID and that citizens were fools for wearing them – there was nary a hint of nobility; just a lie to preserve the N95 mask supply for hospitals. It did, however, mark the start of a series of lies, omissions, and half-truths that would come to define how “science” was seen by the public.

This will be Fauci’s lasting legacy: a man who undercut science in his quest for personal glory.

The reason we can be so confident about this legacy is that the data already is showing clearly the negative effects of Fauci’s “noble lie” and its many corollaries. FiveThirtyEight noted in a recent article that there is a swiftly growing gap between partisan groups regarding confidence in the scientific community. Sixty-five percent of Democrats had “a great deal” of confidence in scientists, up from 50 percent before the pandemic, while Republicans were down seven points to 32 percent during the same period.

Put another way, the “confidence gap” between Republicans and Democrats tripled during the pandemic. The cause is hardly a mystery.

From the outset, citizens had ample reason to suspect that both Washington’s political leadership and the scientific community, with Fauci’s face always front and center, were motivated by factors other than “science.”  Throughout the pandemic, it was clear that the accumulation and exercise of power at all levels of government was far more important than mere science.

With the power given to him (by both Donald Trump and Joe Biden), Fauci quickly moved himself from scientific representative to anointed policymaker. His aggressive strategy included going on offense against anyone who dared disagree with him, including members of Congress. “So it’s easy to criticize [me],” Fauci said in reference to Sen. Rand Paul’s questioning of his prominent role in COVID policy, “but they’re really criticizing science, because I represent science.”

Such exchanges exemplified another insidious element of the COVID debate. “Follow the science” was absolute gospel, and questioning Fauci was portrayed as something practiced only by ignorant people; those who neither understood nor accepted “science.” This new dynamic strengthened an already rising trend of science skepticism, no doubt due to the same condescending attitude of Leftists in the debate over global warming, across the educational divide.

Seemingly lost on Fauci is the notion that science relies for its acceptance and development on trust — both within the scientific community and the public at large. What good are scientific results if they cannot be trusted?

In seeking to enrich himself with the trust and power mistakenly afforded to him during the pandemic, Fauci has undermined the very trust in science that he claims to uphold; trust that is neither quickly nor easily restored.

While Fauci’s visage thankfully has been somewhat less visible in recent weeks (a factor it is hoped will continue), the damage his lies (including some not so “noble”) have wrought, will be with us long after he retires from his high-paying job at the taxpayer trough. Fauci’s legacy will be to have singularly undermined the public’s faith in “science” as applied to public policy in perhaps the same way the Vatican debunked Galileo’s scientific methodology four centuries ago.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

You have to admire the  Biden administration’s chutzpah. Just as the left is having conniption fits over the possibility that entrepreneur Elon Musk might buy one of the left’s favored social media “disinformation sites” as a way to pull it kicking and screaming into the open public arena, government gatekeepers at the massive Department of Homeland Security announced the birth of an “official” disinformation office.

The public first learned of this new office, the “Disinformation Governance Board” or “DGB,” on April 27 when DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas almost casually mentioned it while he was testifying before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee considering the department’s 2023 budget. The on-the-record mention about DGB that took place between Mayorkas and Democratic Illinois Rep. Lauren Underwood, appeared to have been orchestrated beforehand, and was neatly slipped in during a conversation about “minority communities .  .  .  being targeted [by] misinformation”; itself a rather odd topic to crop up during a hearing about Homeland Security’s budget.

Unlike other “review boards” created by federal agencies, such as the Homeland Security Department’s February 3, 2022 announcement in the Federal Register that a “Cyber Safety Review Board” had been established, no such formal announcement accompanied the birth of this new “disinformation” bureaucracy. The omission was not likely the result of a bureaucratic oversight, but rather a tacit acknowledgment of the extremely controversial nature of the new “governance” board.

It also is hardly to be considered a coincidence that DGB’s birth announcement came just two days after Musk’s announced plan to buy the giant social media platform Twitter. The unconventional manner by which the Biden administration unveiled the existence of the DGB appears timed in response to Musk’s Twitter gambit; it reflects the terror his move generated in the minds of the political Left, which has long relied on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to frame and convey its agenda, while simultaneously weakening its conservative rivals.

The controversial — actually, constitutionally disturbing — nature of this new board was compounded later the same day of its announcement, when Politico reported that an openly proud “disinformation fellow” from the liberal Woodrow Wilson Center — Nina Jankowicz — would be the newly created office’s inaugural executive director. If establishing  the DGB was not a serious and not-so-subtle move to squelch information the administration finds distasteful or otherwise problematic, placing Jankowicz at its helm would be laughable. But it is not humorous in the least.

On the one hand, placing a buffoon like Jankowicz in charge of the DGB will tend to undermine any future credibility DGB might conceivably develop. Jankowicz has a history of employing social media in ways both serious and childish to criticize and lampoon Donald Trump and otherwise serious matters as the Hunter Biden laptop story (now revealed as a very tangible potential national security breach).

However, placing anyone in command of a component of the huge and well-funded Department of Homeland Security, and empowering that office to search for, identify, defend against, and if necessary, neutralize, “disinformation” — which by any definition is amorphous — can be at best chilling, and at worst, an investigative cudgel with which to penalize an administration’s political enemies.

The history of government agencies empowered to gather and database information on American citizens and institutions has not been kind to constitutional principles. By coincidence, just the day before Mayorkas’ revealing testimony, another federal agency that for decades has been gathering information on untold numbers of banking transactions by citizens and businesses — the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or “FinCEN” — was the subject of another congressional oversight hearing concerned with such broad data-basing powers.

Given the trajectory being travelled by the Biden administration, emphasizing the need for the sternest measures possible to combat “disinformation,” and considering the political headwinds bearing down on Democrats as the country closes in on the November elections, it is unlikely either the U.S. House or Senate will take steps before then to rein in this latest agency, which even some Democrats have compared to George Orwell’s dystopian “Ministry of Truth” from “1984.”

If the DGB is in fact allowed to remain nestled within the massive bureaucracy at Homeland Security for any length of time and comes to enjoy a continuing budget, it likely will some day morph into at least a poor man’s version of that Orwellian ministry.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

The Democrat Party in 2020 subjected the United States to a truly grave disservice by hiding from the American electorate candidate Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. The question now is, can the damage to the country be contained; a predicament we have not faced for more than a century, if ever.

There were telltale signs of Biden’s slips during the last campaign, but as a candidate he still did well enough in the debates (where the bar has become increasingly low) and in his limited public appearances, such that it seemed he had enough left in the tank to get through at least one term.

In hindsight, it is clear he was already running on fumes.

It is no secret that the emotional and physical stress of the presidency will rapidly age whoever occupies the office, regardless of how young or old he or she may be. One only need look at the before and after pictures of George W. Bush or Barack Obama – both relatively young men when first elected – to see the changes eight years in the Oval Office will bring.

Biden, who at 78 was the oldest ever to be inaugurated, was already at a distinct disadvantage even before having to deal with the simultaneous challenges of a pandemic, a cratering economy, serious national security challenges in Afghanistan, and now an actual war between an ally and an adversarial superpower.

The burdens of the past 16 months have taken a visible toll and we are not yet near the incumbent’s first term midpoint. His noticeable absences from key moments on the world stage has America leading from behind, and if this trend continues, America will in fact be left behind. Once surrendered, a nation’s position as world leader is not easily reclaimed.

As Woodrow Wilson’s mental and physical decline a century ago revealed, protecting America’s global interests is not a passive duty. Incapacitated by a severe stroke in his second term, historians point to the failure of the League of Nations as due in large measure to Wilson’s compromised health. His inability to drum up sufficient support for the United States to join the international organization led directly to its demise, and ultimately helped precipitate the Second World War.

International diplomacy has grown incalculably more complicated since Wilson’s era, and a United States that is largely absent from global power plays in this 21st Century leaves our national interests extremely vulnerable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the dynamics of that situation is just one of many ongoing international challenges facing the United States. North Korea once again is threatening to ramp up its nuclear program, China is an increasingly belligerent threat to Taiwan, and the U.S. is currently engaged in sensitive and far-reaching nuclear talks with Iran.

A president operating at anything other than the top of his game for any one of these vital national security issues would be dangerous. A drowsy commander-in-chief attempting to navigate all of them at once is potentially catastrophic.

 Biden fumbling for words even with the aid of a teleprompter, then searching blankly for a staffer to guide him to an exit, are images not lost on our allies or our adversaries. Administration spokespersons pretending publicly that everything is fine in the face of the obvious, makes the problem worse, not better.

Domestically, the challenges are not any easier, and the lack of a head of state slows our ability to respond to domestic emergencies. Critical decisions become outsourced to staff and officials who are neither elected nor accountable for their actions. This is a recipe for unrestrained bureaucratic activism, if not outright corruption.

We have seen examples of this before, as when Richard Nixon surrendered much of presidential decision making to his aides, including Henry Kissinger, as he became consumed with his looming and almost-certain impeachment in 1973. But never have we been forced to suffer under an Administration led by a president undergoing such obvious cognitive decline as facing us right now.

Who is controlling the levers of power in the White House? In Foggy Bottom and at the Pentagon? At the CIA and the FBI? Even on Capitol Hill? Far, far too much is at stake at home and abroad for this series of questions to have anything other than an honest and crystal-clear answer. Right now, we have neither.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.