Categories
Update

Fauci Refused to Answer

Dr. Fauci, Anthony Fauci, covid, pardons, Biden, justice

The revelations of the Fauci Diaries, and the non-revelations of the Senate grilling of Anthony Fauci, continue to receive commentary and reaction.

“Senator Rand Paul, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the journals this weekend, days before Fauci is scheduled to testify under subpoena,” Connor Boyack, writing on Substack. “Fauci’s vanity is going viral on 𝕏 because vanity is easily observable, a little funny, and confirms what half the country already suspected about him.”

So why wouldn’t Fauci answer even technical questions? Medical YouTuber John Campbell expressed more than just wonder. His video includes segments from Rand Paul worth watching:

“Let the record show,” says the senator, “that the witness has refused to answer whether there is a folder in front of him. . . .” That was after the mere second time Fauci responded with his pleading the Fifth Amendment.

For analysis of the hearing, you may not be able to find better commentary than from Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein on the Dark Horse podcast — where they explain precisely what kind of monster Fauci is:

But not everyone is on board with the criticism of the former bureaucrat. Consider this discussion on The Hill’s Rising program, between libertarian Robby Soave and Democrat :

Soave begins by noting Fauci’s private recognition, prior to March 2020, that the infamous “wet market” was not the source of the coronavirus, but the amplifier. Fauci is thus clearly revealed as a liar and conspirator against the truth of the Lab Leak Hypothesis. Soave’s interlocutor, however, gamely-if-absurdly tries to defend the Fauc, minimizing the insider’s lies as non-crimes.

Meanwhile, at NPR, we can see subsidized media still pushing the zoonotic (“wet market”) explanation, as in Rachel Carlson’s “Animal spillover? Lab leak? What the science says about the origins of COVID-19” — this July 29, 2026, article is an embarrassment.

NPR is still pushing a lie. Astounding? Or just doing what insider and wannabe-insider Democrats (and other proponents of uniting big government with big business) must believe, to maintain their discredited ideology?

Boyack reminds us of the context not only of the diaries, but of the day-earlier revelation that Fauci had set up a network to give his own self awards and money. “Something clarifying happens as you read through these documents. They stop being a story about one man’s (deficient) character and become a story about a system doing exactly what it was built to do. Institutions produce whatever they pay for, and this one paid for prestige. Prestige requires certainty; certainty cannot survive open questions; therefore open questions had to be reclassified as threats. (Remember what Fauci said in November 2021? “They’re really criticizing science, because I represent science.”)”

The problem is the system itself. And it is not science. It is bureaucracy, and more than that: a scam. Fauci represents, but is not, that system. How many Americans will come to their senses about it?

Categories
Thought

F. Marion Crawford

Alexander Patoff stood by his brother’s side, watching the ceremony with intense interest. He hated the Turks and despised their faith, but what he now saw appealed to the Orientalism of his nature. Himself capable of the most distant extremes of feeling, sensitive, passionate, and accustomed to delight in strong impressions, he could not fail to be moved by the profound solemnity of the scene and by the indescribable wildness of the Imam’s chant. Paul, too, was silent, and, though far less able to feel such emotions than his elder brother, the sight of such unanimous and heart-felt devotion called up strange trains of thought in his mind, and forced him to speculate upon the qualities and the character which still survived in these hereditary enemies of his nation. It was not possible, he said to himself, that such men could ever be really conquered. They might be driven from the capital of the East by overwhelming force, but they would soon rally in greater numbers on the Asian shore. They might be crushed for a moment, but they could never be kept under, nor really dominated. Their religion might be oppressed and condemned by the oppressor, but it was of the sort to gain new strength at every fresh persecution. To slay such men was to sow dragon’s teeth and to reap a harvest of still more furious fanatics, who, in their turn being destroyed, would multiply as the heads of the Hydra beneath the blows of Heracles. The even rise and fall of those long lines of stalwart Mussulmans seemed like the irrepressible tide of an ocean, which if restrained, would soon break every barrier raised to obstruct it.

Francis Marion Crawford, a passage from his 1887 novel Paul Patoff, Chapter Two.

Categories
Today

Slavery Ended

On August 1, 1834, Great Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 took force, freeing slaves throughout much of the British empire.

William Wilberforce, one of the country’s main anti-slavery politicians, had lived long enough in July 1833 to hear that the bill would pass, dying on the 29th, with the bill receiving royal assent a month later.

August 1 births include Francis Scott Key (1779), composer of the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner”; American authors Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815) and Herman Melville (1819); and Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (1972), historian, popularizer of Austrian economics, and podcaster of the Tom Woods Show.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Put It Out of Their Missouri

Missouri, Amendment 4, citizens initiative

Is there no good idea a politician cannot spoil?

Take what’s on next Tuesday’s Missouri ballot. “Amendment 4 was my idea, but I am voting against it,” Ron Calzone wrote on Monday in The Missouri Times.

Mr. Calzone had advanced what is called a Concurrent Majority Ratification process. It was introduced into the legislature by Representative Bill Kidd as HJR 132 in 2022. And then politicians started revising.

Everyone agreed, says Calzone, that Missouri’s constitution “was too easy to amend,” considering “the fact that 50% + 1 of the vote can come from just the urban areas” and thereby inflict upon less-populated rural regions a “Tyranny of the Majority.”

The original notion was “to require a broad consensus before imposing laws on the People.” Before the state constitution could be changed, a majority of voters in a majority of legislative districts would have to concur.

The current Amendment 4, however, though promoted as a solution, really adds three humongous problems:

  1. The amendment applies only to citizen-initiated constitutional revisions — not legislative ones.This is the double standard regarding initiative processes we’ve seen legislatures try over and over again, across the country. Politicians like carving for themselves all sorts of advantages.*
  2. The current measure would require approval of measures in all, not just a majority, of the state’s eight congressional districts. Almost impossible to achieve, it would reinforce a status quo, certainly not rein current powers in.
  3. It shifts the power to alter the constitution from the people to the legislature.

One could write whole histories of how politicians can screw up a good reform. Amendment 4 is now no reform at all.

Doesn’t deserve the name.

Thankfully, Missourians can kill it. On Tuesday.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Legislators complain there have been too many amendments but as Calzone points out: “The fact is, over 80% of the amendments to the Missouri Constitution since 1910 were proposed by the legislature.” 

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Categories
Today

DeFoe Pelted

On July 31, 1703, Daniel Defoe — who would later become famous as the author of Robinson Crusoe and other literary works — was placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel. The sedition pertained to a satirical pamphlet he had published, “The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church.” The mob pelted him with flowers.

Categories
Thought

Poor Richard

Make yourselves sheep, and the wolves will eat you.

Benjamin Franklin, letter to Thomas Cushing (1773).

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment Fifth Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Fauci Can’t Lie

Anthony Fauci, Congress, Covid, 5th Amendment

Is there any crime for which Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, will be prosecuted?

The multi-millionaire former “public servant” received a full and unconditional pardon “FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in . . .” 

Courtesy of Mr. Biden — or his auto-pen.

“Biden backdated the pardon to 2014, a date nearly six years before the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 emerged,” Newsweek reported a year and a half ago.

Why? Come on, man! Because it “shields Fauci from allegations tied to U.S.-funded gain-of-function research in addition to his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

So, Fauci is immune from prosecution for 

  1. a decade’s worth of skirting U.S. domestic restrictions, to fund gang-of-function research at the lab in Wuhan, China; 
  2. for each and every lie he told Senator Rand Paul and others in Congress; and 
  3. for any other fraud — such as using his federal employees to solicit more than a million dollars in cash prizes for him personally.

So when Fauci — formerly known as “the Science” — asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times before Congress (NBC says 106), refusing to answer questions about his past role as a government official, it was illegitimate. Because on those matters, he cannot be incriminated.

“No person,” reads the amendment, “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” There can be no criminal case brought for his past lies.

But the problem for Dr. Fauci is that he can be prosecuted for telling those lies again to Congress. Like at yesterday’s hearing. 

Past lies? You’re pardoned, Doc. 

But Fauci cannot repeat his lies. That would be a new crime. 

And since he wants those falsehoods to stand, he will not speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously on Common Sense:

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Categories
Thought

Tocqueville

There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult — to begin a war and to end it.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (1840), Book Three, Chapter XXII.

Categories
Today

Virginia, 1619 & 1676

On July 30, 1619, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convened for the first time in Jamestown, Virginia.

About a month later, a group of “twenty and odd” captives from what is now Angola landed in Hampton; this is what most Americans, today, refer to as the significant event in American history for the year “1619.”

On the same late day in July, 1676, Nathaniel Bacon issued the “Declaration of the People of Virginia,” beginning Bacon’s Rebellion against the rule of Governor William Berkeley.

Categories
Fourth Amendment rights property rights

Open Fields Closed

IJ, Institute for Justice, privacy, property, Pennsylvania, Court

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled 7-0 to protect the state’s hunting clubs from warrantless searches of their property.

The Institute for Justice observes that the decision protects the right “to be secure on their land” of all Pennsylvanians “and marks a final victory with no further appeal available.”

The decision is a big deal. For decades, courts have accepted the “open fields doctrine” advanced in a 1924 U.S. Supreme Court decision. According to this rule — or rationalization — officials may conduct warrantless searches on any land beyond that which immediately surrounds a home. Even if the open-field land is clearly marked as private property.

This, despite the fact that the Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless searches and the issuing of warrants without probable cause.

Other courts have routinely followed the 1924 precedent. The result, says IJ, has been that “about 96% of all private land in the country, and over 90% of all private land in Pennsylvania, was previously exposed to warrantless searches and surveillance.”

The present case arose because officials of the Pennsylvania Game Commission conducted frequent fishing expeditions on the lands of IJ’s clients, the Punxsutawney and Pitch Pine hunting clubs.

Like the Institute, the president of the Punxsutawney Hunting Club, Frank Stockdale, is confident that the ruling “is a victory for all landowners in Pennsylvania.”

This same logic should be pushed throughout the union, curbing government and providing owners the same common-sense protections in every state.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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