John Tierney at City Journal interviews Rob Montz, who just did a documentary called "It Wasn't Fauci: How the Deep State Played Trump."
Now, I know, the first part of that title isn't so promising.
But let's hear a little about Deborah Birx.
I've written a lot about these issues at City Journal, how these terrible measures were imposed against the longstanding advice of the best experts on dealing with pandemics and against the best scientific evidence about these measures. Now, this was, I think, the costliest and worst mistake ever made in the history of public health. Probably the worst public policy blunder ever made during peacetime in America. And like a lot of people, I've wondered, how could we be so stupid? Well, Rob answers that question in his new documentary, and the answer will be news to the many people who put all the blame on Anthony Fauci.
Now, there's no question that Fauci bears a lot of responsibility. He was the public face of Covid. He was the darling of the gullible reporters in the mainstream media who bought his version of "the science." And because his agency controlled so much of the research funding into infectious diseases, scientists depended on that funding, were afraid to contradict them, and therefore there was a silence from people who knew better. But as Rob shows in his documentary, it was another veteran federal bureaucrat who actually orchestrated these terrible measures and conned Donald Trump and the White House into going along with it. Her name is Deborah Birx. Could you tell us about her, Rob?
Montz talks about people not wanting to even think about covid any longer - and by "people," he means the people who were wrong about everything, or believed the people who were wrong about everything.
Rob Montz: ...
They don't really want to be told that it actually wasn't worth it at all. There was no nobility to it. The cousin of yours that died of a drug overdose didn't die for a good reason. The fact that your nine-year-old still can't read. It's not for any particularly good reason. The fact that you had to shutter your family business, there was no good reason. So people just want to move on, even though, as I'm sure your audience knows, there's been a lot of pretty rigorous investigations into the efficacy of the lockdowns, and they've essentially proven that they had no impact whatsoever on cases or death rates.
Would you be surprised to learn that Mike Pence shepherded Deborah Birx into power?
Rob Montz: And it's so funny because the ways that lockdowns became the default policy prescription in America, it's so pedestrian. It's like Alex Jones-style conspiracy theorizing has all these grand forces and complicated machinery and all these complex variables, but then you dig into how Birx got power and it's the most mundane thing imaginable, and the mistakes she made is the most mundane thing in imaginable, and that became the default policy prescription for nearly 400 million Americans. So she immediately, in the wake of Covid hitting American shores in 2019, early 2020, the White House forms a special Covid task force. Importantly, Trump gives Pence complete control of the task force. He essentially outsources the whole Covid task force portfolio to Pence. And as they're assembling this group, they're frantically looking around for a public health expert that can bring some level of scientific rigor to their policy prescriptions for the rest of the country. And through a complicated set of connections, someone within the Trump administration recommends Deborah Birx. Her background importantly is in fighting AIDS in Africa.
It turns out that a report on Birx's performance in "fighting AIDS" says that she was a disaster.
Rob Montz: And it comes out, and this thing, which is mostly based upon surveys with municipal and public health officials in African countries that have been working with Deborah Birx, is a barnburner of an indictment on her management and leadership. It's insane. I mean, anybody can read it. It's not difficult to find. It's just nobody did read it because nobody's curious about it.
John Tierney: Right. This is the first I've seen of it, and it really is a barn burner showing what a horrible administrator she was.
Rob Montz: Everyone's like, she's a dictator. She doesn't listen to feedback. She very quickly becomes myopically committed to a particular paradigm and doesn't change it based upon the facts on the ground. She's dictatorial.
John Tierney: Draws the wrong conclusions, you say?
Rob Montz: Yeah. She draws conclusions that lead down the wrong path. And this is the person who then gets brought up to be part of this elite group of, it's only like 10 people that are principals on the Covid task force, and she's the chief scientist on the task force. That's the woman. Somehow the mechanics of history are such that she's the person that gets to write the guidelines. And what she does, and again, I don't want to give away everything in the documentary, I want people to have a reason to go watch it, is she essentially makes this 75 IQ instinctual parallel between Covid and AIDS. She makes a certain set of assumptions that the Covid virus and HIV/AIDS virus are the same. And from those parallel assumptions come a certain set of policy prescriptions, including getting to zero cases at any cost, treating Covid as an equal opportunity killer, focusing on children and shutting down schools. This is all based on an HIV/AIDS paradigm.
John Tierney: Right, where every case is potentially fatal.
Rob Montz: Exactly. I don't know. This is not a hot contrarian take to be like, "Yo Covid's not like HIV/AIDS." Not at all. It's extremely different. They're radically different diseases. We get into a bunch of the particulars, not least of which, and again, it's still shocking how few Americans seem to appreciate this. It's mostly because of the thematic misinformation fed to them by the corporate establishment media, that there's this really, really sharp age gradient for Covid death where it's a serious disease if you're 74, and it's not a serious disease at all if you're 20. And that reality needs to be reflected in your policy interventions. And it wasn't. Then the central mystery also that we try to solve, Trump initially had okayed the lockdown and very famously cut off air transportation from China. He greenlit a couple weeks to slow the spread, and then a couple more weeks.
He talks about Trump coming out publicly against lockdowns, while his actual government continued to push them. He says Deborah Birx was the "linchpin" for the government going in an opposite direction from the president which supposedly led it.
With Mike Pence's help:
Rob Montz: But my reporting mostly indicates that she was able, Birx in particular, was able to systematically stymie and marginalized Atlas, not because of her close alliance with Fauci and Redfield, but because of her close alliance with Mike Pence. Remarkable, right?
John Tierney: And he really emerges as another villain. He was supposedly in charge of the task force, but he just bowed to her at every turn. He was afraid to stand up to her. Right?
Rob Montz: Well, it's not exactly, I don't really know his motivations. From a distance, before I'd gotten into this, he'd always struck me as the paradigmatic hollow man elected politician. He just seems like he was grown in a lab and is a soulless political automaton, and he just regurgitates on command GOP Christianist talking points. Are you even a person? Do you have a subjective experience of reality, or are you just a non-player character? So I don't really know what his motivations were. I don't really know.
Full interview at the link, of course.
Deborah Birx went to Mike Pence and asked for his permission to "continue to write the guidelines" for shutdowns and re-openings which would directly contradict Trump. Pence understood she intended to be insubordinate, and he granted her permission to do so.
Also a Birx Booster: Jared Kushner, who was terrified at the idea of breaking from the Fauci/Birx line.
The second half of the mini-doc is infuriating. If you don't watch the whole thing, make sure you start watching from around the 10:00 mark.
The documentary itself is only 25 minutes long and is linked below. Along with the New York Times waking up after three years and realizing hey, maybe the lockdowns hurt students, huh?
Wait until they hear about the suicide and drug overdose numbers in adults!
Bonus: NPR: Did the so-called Deep State protect the country from Trump?
In other words: Did the Deep State stage a COUP that the establishment Regime approves of?
Answer: Yes.
DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. A few years back, we started hearing about a sinister, unseen force threatening American progress. It was the deep state, an unnamed group of officials within the U.S. government that would always use their leverage in the federal bureaucracy to oppose change, either because the deep staters were wedded to ill-advised policies of the past or because they sought to protect their own power, status, salary and pensions. The menace of the deep state was an idea particularly propagated by backers of President Donald Trump.
Our guest, David Rothkopf, says if there is a deep state, we should probably be thanking rather than condemning it. His new book recounts many instances during the Trump administration when veteran government officials quietly intervened to undermine some of Trump's most troubling orders and policy initiatives, not because they threatened the officials' personal interests, but because they were illegal, unworkable, immoral or against the country's interests.
The Deep State decided that the policy agenda elected by the voting public was "against the country's interests," you say?