AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan
Believe it or not, there is at least one American who has managed to plummet even faster in the polls than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the most cumulatively unpopular president and vice president in recent history. Though reaching such high levels of national unpopularity is far from an easy task, the man who has succeeded in doing so represents nearly everything wrong with the federal bureaucracy and the Washington, D.C. ruling class. This man is none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci, who much of the country has now come to see as the symbolic face of an endless pandemic.
Fauci—who routinely brushes off legitimate criticisms of himself as “attacks on science,” has likely never turned down a television interview, and has a shrine with prayer candles dedicated to himself in his own home—has done much to forfeit the trust of the American people since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the more notable examples of Fauci’s untrustworthiness in the public eye is his deliberate flip-flopping on the efficacy of masks: in March 2020, he claimed “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask” and that although “wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet,” it would not provide “the perfect protection that people think that it is.”
Fast-forward to July, Fauci freely admitted to the Washington Post that he had consciously lied to the public about the usefulness of masks in his earlier statements, now insisting that masks were essential and conceding that his primary concern back in March was merely to “save the masks for the people who really needed them.” In other words, according to Fauci himself, he believed all along that masks would protect people, but simply deceived the public for what he believed to be ‘the greater good’ – in this case, the good of his peers in the medical community. In Fauci’s mind, he—as a member of America’s elite ruling class—was exercising what he believed was his right to lie.
This phenomenon of a left-wing “right to lie” did not begin with Fauci; rather, it has long been a defining feature of the progressive left in their pursuit of power. One of the most notorious examples occurred just over a decade ago with the promotion and eventual passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Former President Barack Obama notoriously claimed that the ACA would “cut the cost of a typical family’s health insurance premium by up to $2,500 a year” and that “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it” – something Obama himself knew was false and earned the “lie of the year” award from even left-leaning PolitiFact. Nonetheless, Obama’s speechwriters later casually laughed about their blatant dishonesty in an interview with 60 Minutes.
Shortly after Obamacare’s passage, Jonathan Gruber—widely seen as the chief architect of the legislation—infamously told a panel that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.” He went on: “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.” Thus, according to Gruber and other like-minded Obama administration officials, telling a series of bald-faced lies directly to the American people is entirely permissible—and even encouraged—so long as doing so furthers their own goals and favors their own political fortunes.
The left’s reliance on the “right to lie” as a means of expediting their political priorities reached its apex during the years of the Trump presidency, which the left saw as an existential threat to their goals, their agenda, and their conception of a properly ordered society.
The crowning example of the left’s politics of dishonesty was their intricate Russia collusion hoax, in which they contrived an elaborate series of fabrications trying to pin former President Donald Trump as a “Russian asset” who was in the pocket of Vladimir Putin. This strategy ultimately culminated in an attempt to remove Trump from office—an ambition that, in the mind of the left, was so important that it had to be accomplished by any means necessary, even if that required constructing the fantastical story of Donald Trump as a secret foreign spy.
Although virtually everyone involved in the hoax—from the FBI, to the media, to Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton and Adam Schiff—was fully aware that Trump was not, in fact, a Russian agent, they nevertheless spent nearly three years trying to use the lies to throw Trump out of office. And when the truth finally came out, the mainstream media simply carried on as if nothing had happened. As Amanda Milius—director of the film The Plot Against the President—noted, “It was the blueprint for how they lie to us” and “how they turn the whole country in the opposite direction of reality.”
President Joe Biden is also a prime example of a man who believes his political interests are so important that he has a “right to lie”: for nearly his entire career, he has unashamedly plagiarized speeches and fabricated details about his personal biography, from fibbing about his law school grades, to claiming that he was arrested for trying to see Nelson Mandela, and most famously, ripping off the family history of a British politician to flavor his 1988 presidential campaign stump speech. He has also lied consistently about the tragic death of his first wife and child in a car crash, embellishing the story with false details about the driver of the other car, painting him as a drunk driver—even though he was not drunk and likely not even at fault for the accident. As Kevin D. Williamson wrote for National Review, “The casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions—for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches—is remarkable.”
Since he took office as president, Biden has also lied about key details surrounding his disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, his plans to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations, and countless other issues of major concern to Americans—thereby further cementing his status as a serial liar. As recently as January, he falsely claimed he was “arrested” during a civil rights protest, something for which even the Washington Post granted him four “Pinocchios.” But as with Fauci, Obama, and every other prophet of the Radical Left, Biden’s lies are either ignored or explained away. They’re in the service of the right political agenda—so they’re perfectly okay.
Of course, the left’s lies can only withstand the truth for so long. Americans quickly learned the facts about Obamacare and swept Democrats’ congressional majorities away in 2010. And now, a recent poll found that only 31 percent of Americans trust Dr. Fauci on COVID-19 while only 15.5 percent trust Biden. People want leaders who give it to them straight. If Biden actually wants to stave off disaster this fall and resurrect his image, he might start with telling the truth, as uncomfortable as it may be.