Once again, our governing “elites” are illustrating their cluelessness about just how low the public’s opinion of them has sunk, and why.  

The latest example involves Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who rage-quit his post last week after his bosses, noting the pandemic “emergency” is long over, ended special rules allowing for broad use of the COVID-19 shot. 

“This is where fascism lives,” Daskalakis angrily declared as he and other Centers for Disease Control officials stalked off their jobs.

“Fascism” seems to be this administration’s most over-diagnosed ailment, applied with abandon to anything the left doesn’t like. 

But Daskalakis’, uh, fevered response is exactly what you don’t want from a public health official.

In fact, given widespread public doubts about the COVID jab and the general debacle of the CDC’s COVID response, the last thing we need is a hysterical and politically extreme figure in charge of immunizations. 

We need someone steady, sensible, respectable and respected in that job — but what we got with Daskalakis was another lefty theater kid putting on a show.

This is a man who made himself famous by posing on a magazine cover wearing a leather pentagram harness, and showed off his bondage-gear collection in numerous publicly distributed photos. 

Daskalakis ran the Biden administration’s weak response to the monkeypox outbreak — pushing to rename the illness “mpox” for reasons of political correctness.

Although he and other government experts were aware that the disease was spreading mostly via sex parties in the gay community, they chose to downplay that fact for fear of “stigma” and pretend that every American was equally at risk. 

“Political correctness and a desire not to offend drove the messaging and public health response,” the Oversight Project, a government watchdog, found in 2023: “Officials were primarily concerned with not stigmatizing (mpox carriers), the exact opposite of the COVID response.”

Yes: During COVID, the CDC ordered us to stand aside as our loved ones died alone in hospitals, and made us postpone or downsize weddings and funerals.

Based on CDC guidance, states and cities canceled our church services and even punished us for going outdoors without masks.  

But monkeypox was different: “You know, one person’s idea of risk is another person’s idea of a great festival or Friday night,” Daskalakis said breezily as he explained why the CDC didn’t order the shutdown of gatherings where mpox was spreading.

“So we have to sort of embrace that with joy.”

As Will Chamberlain noted on X, “The CDC is utterly useless if it is not seen as credible by the majority of the country, and yet they employed a guy with massive satanic tattoos who wore bondage gear during a photo shoot as their point person on immunization.”

Daskalakis’ antics may seem delightfully edgy to members of our governing class, but they play very differently with the normal-American community. 

It seemed deliberately provocative to choose the gay bondage guy as the face of the agency’s immunization PR at a time of spreading skepticism about modern vaccines.

Then again, Biden put cross-dressing luggage thief Sam Brinton in charge of nuclear waste, so I guess it was par for the course. 

But now we have a new administration, with new priorities.

DEI programs of the sort loved by the prior administration stress “cultural competence,” but its practitioners never bother to demonstrate competence in the nation’s mainstream culture. 

When that comes back to bite you it isn’t “fascism,” but the wages of narcissistic political ineptitude.

Of course, these problems might be forgivable if the CDC was, you know, good at its actual job. 

But it’s not.  

This was demonstrated in its shambolic response to Ebola a decade ago, and much more dramatically demonstrated in its equally shambolic response to COVID.

In truth, most of our institutions have become useless and corrupt as those who run them become more concerned with performing for fellow elites than performing their actual jobs. 

And because the elites have such contempt for normal people, they reward those who seem “transgressive” — regardless of whether they’re good at their jobs (they often aren’t), and regardless the damage done to public trust.

If you were an artist on the Left Bank in 1925 it may have been amusing, or at least attention-getting, to épater les bourgeois (annoy the ordinary folks). 

In 2025, it’s just embarrassing. 

And even the French avant-garde saved that stuff for the arts, not for public health.

Enough. 

Nobody wants to have weird shocking people injecting things into their veins. 

How about hiring some nice, boring, trustworthy, competent people for a change?

Or watch the CDC fade into irrelevance.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.