THERE'S SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE.

To Outside the Beltway political scientist Steven Taylor, it exists, but it's not exactly clear.  "I am not going to try and go deeply into any of this at the moment but will note that just like it is difficult to convince a lot of Americans that inflation, for example, is a global phenomenon, so too it is often overlooked the degree to which this political moment of nationalist/populist/reactionary politics is also global and not just a Trump-based phenomenon."

I don't know, maybe over a quarter century of elite failure might have something to do with it.

The public health establishment, as Kennedy observes, could hardly have failed more miserably than it did during Covid. Its ugly authoritarian streak and myopic worldview were both on full display. Public health officials amazingly denied the existence of natural immunity, stubbornly insisted on the efficacy of masks, and blithely suggested that they couldn’t care less whether locking down the economy and shutting kids out of schools caused the ruination of many thousands of businesses, the borrowing of many trillions of dollars, and the impoverishing of many millions of childhoods. Public health officials also wildly asserted, in the words of Biden’s CDC director Rochelle Walensky, that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus” and “don’t get sick”—a claim shown to be pure nonsense.

Yet Covid merely shined a spotlight on a public health establishment whose ineptitude, self-interestedness, insulation, and indifference to genuine scientific inquiry dates back at least 40 years, to the AIDS crisis. Instead of having independent research be conducted by inquisitive, truth-seeking scientists from coast to coast, almost all such research has been funneled through a small cabal of interested individuals who control, shape, and limit that research. Essentially all of the money for such research flows through the federal government, and only those who toe the party line get the government’s—that is, the taxpayers’—money.

That's Tom Klingenstein's colleague Jeffrey Anderson reviewing Robert Kennedy's campaign manifesto, The Real Anthony Fauci.  Make of the review and the arguments what you will, and yet a sponsored research establishment that has become rent-seeking and censorious didn't inspire confidence, Mr Kennedy even quotes Ike warning us (“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”); and over half a century of inconclusive nation-building wars and a foreign policy establishment that cannot offer a coherent principle applicable in Gaza and Eastern Ukraine alike, and apparently you can't fix poverty by throwing printed money at it.  Bring up such things, though, and the palace guard media will "fact check" you.

One would think that a free press corps would call out the public health bureaucrats over such ludicrous claims, which could easily have been checked. But as Kennedy observes, “The now-popular term ‘misinformation’ has come to mean any expression that departs from official orthodoxies.” Those who depart must be rebuked or censored by the mainstream press and social media.

Scolding Normals that it's better here than it is in Britain or Germany, let alone Venezuela, isn't the argument Professor Taylor thinks it is.  Your condescension and preening about your good intentions and appealing to arguments that don't work off the chalkboard no longer impresses.