Joe Duarte

The NYT needs a conservative columnist. They must meet NYT standards for fact-checking, but present arguments readers will not otherwise encounter. My recommendations: Richard Hanania, Sohrab Ahmari, Wilfred Reilly, Noah Rothman, Jason Chaffetz, Eli Lake, Charles C. W. Cooke, Robby Soave, Amy Chua, or Rob Henderson.

SCOTUS Justice Kavanaugh at Lindsey Graham funeral ...

The world is a nasty place full of nasty people, just like it always has been, yet actual statesmen understand that peace often requires making deals with icky people, as the U.S. has done for centuries with regimes that did far more damage to the U.S. Passive-aggressively mocking the idea of negotiating with bad people is a rather clunky neocon attempt at demanding war until every possible enemy is dead. It’s as childish as it is stupid and ahistorical.

2/ Jason Arday didn't just plagiarize quotes. He then claimed the quotes came from his own interviews -- so plagiarism plus the fabrication of interviews that never occurred (plagrication?). The journal Social Sciences and Cambridge just... let him do it? It's astonishing.

Dr Fauci and Mr. Science The Fauci files reveal not just a sociopathic narcissist, but also a pathological schizophrenic. For years, Fauci was assuring the public of Covid narratives that he either knew were untrue, or knew little about. He posed as a non-partisan, even as he collaborated with the leftwing cable news grandees and liberal columnists to hound his enemies and magnify his godhead. From the virus’s origins and effects of the lockdowns, to the efficacy of the mRNA vaccinations to the always changing 0/1/2 masks wearing protocols, Fauci used his massive government agency, and sycophantic media, to promote his always fluid narratives by punishing enemies and rewarding friends—on the basis of their loyalty to Dr. “I represent science”. He seemed to be obsessed with firing White House Covid advisor Scott Atlas, and demonizing Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff—for the crimes of questioning the Fauci party line. These critics were not radical “let it rip” herd immunologists as the Fauci camp caricatured them, but circumspect, cost-to-benefit doctors and savvy health policy analysts. Their views, if embraced, might have avoided a multibillion-dollar global shutdown that wrecked economies—especially derailing the booming 4th quarter 2019 Trump economy—increased the death toll, destroyed millions of livelihoods, harmed perhaps permanently the education of millions U.S. children, and was hardly based on the “science”. And what exactly were the so-called extremist views of Atlas, Bhattacharya, and others? Healthy children were not at great risk from Covid—but keeping them isolated drained away key resources from the elderly and sick who certainly were vulnerable. And the nationwide school closures had profound negative effects on children and teens as did the lockdowns on the general population. Substance and familial abuse soared, small businesses were ruined, and children’s formative educational years were lost. 24/7 mask wearing was neither practical nor necessary as opposed to their beneficial use by health care workers in close proximities. The experimental mRNA vaccinations may have initially saved lives, but they were not, as billed by Fauci and the pharmaceutical companies, lasting protection from either infectiousness or being infected. And certainly the repeated booster regimens for some could pose serious health risks. Herd immunity was not some crank idea, as the Fauci school libeled these experts, but, along with the initial vaccinations, were time-tested medical realities that would mitigate the toxicity of the pandemic. We have seen a lot of obscene hoaxes recently that changed national events: the loony Jussie Smollett caper; the phony “Steele dossier”; the “51 intelligence authorities” and the Russian-produced Hunter Biden laptop con; and the media fabricated effigy of Joe Biden as “fit as a fiddle”. But Fauci’s effort to attribute the virus to a bat or pangolin publicly, while privately accepting from his own consultants that it likely was birthed in the Wuhan lab’s gain of function research—which he had helped to support via Peter Daszak—and the policies that resulted from that initial lie, proved literally for thousands a matter of life and death.

Wikipedia has now removed DEFUSE from its article on the origins of Covid. Even by Wikipedia’s grotesquely corrupt standards, that is an extraordinary act of historical vandalism. It's like writing about 9/11 while omitting the planes. (DEFUSE is the 2018 blueprint developed by Peter Daszak and his Wuhan lab collaborators for engineering the exact same kinds of coronavirus features that later appeared in Covid. It is the smokingest of smoking guns.)

Trillion dollar a year military spending and we can’t handle sustained conflict for a few months? Where is all the money going?