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Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

 
 
hightor
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 12:07 pm
@georgeob1,
Quote:
I don't recall seeing any "substantiation" in any the editorial opinion pieces you've posted here.

Um, that's why links to the source are provided.
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 12:11 pm
America Is Running on Fumes

In film, science, and the economy, the U.S. has fallen out of love with the hard work of ushering new ideas into the world.

Quote:
Let’s start with a simple mystery: What happened to original blockbuster movies?

Throughout the 20th century, Hollywood produced a healthy number of entirely new stories. The top movies of 1998—including Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, and There’s Something About Mary—were almost all based on original screenplays. But since then, the U.S. box office has been steadily overrun by numbers and superheroes: Iron Man 2, Jurassic Park 3, Toy Story 4, etc. Of the 10 top-grossing movies of 2019, nine were sequels or live-action remakes of animated Disney movies, with the one exception, Joker, being a gritty prequel of another superhero franchise.

Some people think this is awful. Some think it’s fine. I’m more interested in the fact that it’s happening. Americans used to go to movie theaters to watch new characters in new stories. Now they go to movie theaters to re-submerge themselves in familiar story lines.

A few years ago, I saw this shift from exploration to incrementalism as something specific to pop culture. That changed last year when I read a 2020 paper on the decline of originality in science, with a decidedly non-Hollywood title: “Stagnation and Scientific Incentives.”

“New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did,” the economists Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen wrote. In the past few decades, citations have become a key metric for evaluating scientific research, which has pushed scientists to write papers that they think will be popular with other scientists. This causes many of them to cluster around a small set of popular subjects rather than take a gamble that might open a new field of study. To illustrate this shift, the co-authors included a simple drawing in their paper:

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/vwSWop5lggZr3dxevEpG3voy9nc=/0x0:1592x760/655x313/media/img/posts/2021/11/Screen_Shot_2021_11_30_at_1.54.17_PM/original.png

I remember exactly what I thought when I first saw this picture: Hey, it looks like Hollywood! Driven by popularity metrics, scientists, like movie studios, are becoming more likely to tinker in proven domains than to pursue risky original projects that might bloom into new franchises. It’s not that writers, directors, scientists, and researchers can’t physically come up with new ideas. But rather that something in the air—something in our institutions, or our culture—was constraining the growth new ideas. In science, as in cinema, incrementalism is edging out exploration.

I couldn’t get the thought out of my head: Truly new ideas don’t fuel growth the way they once did. I saw its shadow everywhere.

In science and technology: “Everywhere we look we find that ideas are getting harder to find,” a group of researchers from Stanford University and MIT concluded in a 2020 paper. Specifically, they concluded that research productivity has declined sharply in a number of industries, including software, agriculture, and medicine. That conclusion is widely shared. “Scientific knowledge has been in clear secular decline since the early 1970s,” one pair of Swiss researchers put it. The University of Chicago scholar James Evans has found that as the number of scientific researchers has grown, progress has slowed down in many fields, perhaps because scientists are so overwhelmed by the glut of information in their domain that they’re clustering around the same safe subjects and citing the same few papers.

In entrepreneurship: Setting aside a spike during the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. business formation has been declining since the 1970s. One of America’s most important sources of entrepreneurship is immigration—because immigrants are far more likely than native-born Americans to start billion-dollar companies—but the U.S. is in a deep immigration depression at the moment.

In institutions: Until about a century ago, the U.S. was building top-flight colleges and universities at a dazzling clip. But the U.S. hasn't built a new elite university in many decades. The federal government used to build new agencies to deal with novel problems, like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after World War II, or the Advanced Research Project Agency (later known as DARPA) after Sputnik. Although the pandemic embarrassed the CDC, no major conversations are under way about creating new institutions to deal with the problem of 21st-century epidemics.

If you believe in the virtue of novelty, these are disturbing trends. Today’s scientists are less likely to publish truly new ideas, businesses are struggling to break into the market with new ideas, U.S. immigration policy is constricting the arrival of people most likely to found companies that promote new ideas, and we are less likely than previous generations to build institutions that advance new ideas.

“What about all the cool new stuff?” you might ask. What about the recent breakthroughs in mRNA technology? What about CRISPR, and AI, and solar energy, and battery technology, and electric vehicles, and (sure) crypto, and (yes!) smartphones? These are sensational accomplishments—or, in many cases, the promises of future accomplishments—punctuating a long era of broad technological stagnation. Productivity growth and average income growth have declined significantly from their mid-20th-century levels.

New ideas simply don’t fuel growth the way they once did. Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up 25 years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting. There are no cars on the road. Telephones are rare. There is no such thing as Coca-Cola, or sneakers, or basketball, or aspirin. The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.

When you wake up in 1900, the city has been entirely remade with towering steel-skeleton buildings called “skyscrapers” and automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines. People are riding bicycles, with rubber-soled shoes, in modern shorts—all inventions of this period. The Sears catalog, the cardboard box, and aspirin are new arrivals. People recently enjoyed their first sip of Coca-Cola, their first Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and their first bite of what we now call an American hamburger. When you fell asleep in 1875, there was no such thing as a Kodak camera, or recorded music, or an instrument for capturing motion pictures for film projection. By 1900, we have the first version of all three — the simple box camera, the phonograph, and the cinematograph. As you slept, Thomas Edison unveiled his famous light bulb and electrified parts of New York.

It’s been a golden age for building institutions as well. Johns Hopkins University, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Chicago were all founded while you were zonked. In the 1870s, a few Ivy League colleges messed around with rugby and haphazardly invented the sport of football. In 1891, James Naismith, a YMCA instructor in Massachusetts, erected a peach basket in a gymnasium and invented the game of basketball. Four years later and just 10 miles away at another YMCA, the physical-ed teacher William Morgan braided the serve from tennis and elements of team passing from handball to create volleyball.

How can you not be astonished and thrilled by the fact that all of this happened in 25 years? A quarter-century hibernation today would mean dozing off in 1996 and waking up in 2021. You would wonder at smartphones and the internet—marvelous inventions—but the physical world would feel much the same. Compare “cars have replaced horses as the best way to get across town” with “apps have replaced phones as the best way to order takeout.” If you believe in the virtue of novelty in the world of atoms, the golden years were a long time ago.

This is not the first time that somebody has accused America’s invention engine of running on fumes in the 21st century. (Not even the idea that America is running out of ideas is a new idea.)

In 2020, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published the instant-classic essay “It’s Time to Build,” which urged more innovation and entrepreneurship in public health, housing, education, and transportation. “The problem is inertia,” he wrote. “We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.” The same year, Ross Douthat published The Decadent Society, which levied similar criticisms of languishing U.S. creativity. These works are partly descendants of Tyler Cowen’s books The Great Stagnation, which diagnosed a slowdown in America’s innovative mojo, and The Complacent Class, which observed that Americans are self-segregating into comfortable echo chambers rather than taking risks and challenging themselves.

So what, exactly, is happening?

One explanation is that none of this is our fault. We picked all the low-hanging fruit, solved all the secrets, invented all the easy inventions, told all the good stories, and now it’s genuinely harder to keep up the pace of idea generation.

In some ways this is probably true. Science and technology are much more complicated than they were in the 1890s, or in the 1790s. But the fear that nothing is left to discover has always been misguided. In the mid-1890s, the U.S. physicist Albert Michelson famously claimed that “most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established” in the physical sciences. It wasn’t even 10 years later that Albert Einstein first revolutionized our understanding of space, time, mass, and energy.

I don’t think there is an overarching reason for our novelty stagnation. But let me offer three theories that might collectively explain a good chunk of this complex phenomenon.

1. The big marketplace of attention

Almost every smart cultural producer eventually learns the same lesson: Audiences don’t really like brand-new things. They prefer “familiar surprises”—sneakily novel twists on well-known fare.

As the biggest movie studios got more strategic about thriving in a competitive global market, they doubled down on established franchises. As the music industry learned more about audience preferences, radio airplay became more repetitive and the Billboard Hot 100 became more static. Across entertainment, industries now naturally gravitate toward familiar surprises rather than zany originality.

Science is also a transparent marketplace of attention, and it is following the same trajectory as film and music. Scientists know what journals are publishing and what the NIH is funding. The citation revolution pushes scientists to write papers that are likely to appeal to an audience of fellow researchers, who tend to prefer insights that jibe with their background. An analysis of research applications found that the NIH and the National Science Foundation have a demonstrated bias against papers that are highly original, preferring “low levels of novelty.” Scientists are thus encouraged to focus on subjects that they already understand to be popular, which means avoiding work that seems too radical to focus on projects that are just the right blend of familiar and surprising.

The world is one big panopticon, and we don’t fully understand the implications of building a planetary marketplace of attention in which everything we do has an audience. Our work, our opinions, our milestones, and our subtle preferences are routinely submitted for public approval online. Maybe this makes culture more imitative. If you want to produce popular things, and you can easily tell from the internet what’s already popular, you’re simply more likely to produce more of that thing. This mimetic pressure is part of human nature. But perhaps the internet supercharges this trait and, in the process, makes people more hesitant about sharing ideas that aren’t already demonstrably pre-approved, which reduces novelty across many domains.

2. The creep of gerontocracy

We are living in an age of creeping gerontocracy.

Joe Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. (If he had lost, Donald Trump would have been the oldest president in U.S. history.) The average age in Congress has hovered near its all-time high for the past decade. The Democrats’ House speaker and House majority leader are over 80. The Senate majority leader and minority leader are over 70. The fears and anxieties that dominate politics represent older Americans’ fears and fixations.

Across business, science, and finance, power is similarly concentrated among the elderly. The average age of Nobel Prize laureates has steadily increased in almost every discipline, and so has the average age of NIH grant recipients. Among S&P 500 companies, the average age of incoming CEOs has increased by more than a decade in the past 20 years. As I’ve written, Americans 55 and older account for less than one-third of the population, but they own two-thirds of the nation’s wealth—the highest level of wealth concentration on record.

Why does it matter that young people have a voice in tech and culture? Because young people are our most dependable source of new ideas in culture and science. They have the least to lose from cultural change and the most to gain from overthrowing legacies and incumbents.

The philosopher Thomas Kuhn famously pointed out that paradigm shifts in science and technology have often come from young people who revolutionized various subjects precisely because they were not so deeply indoctrinated in their established theories. One of the revolutionaries he mentioned, the physicist Max Planck, quipped that science proceeds “one funeral at a time” because new scientific truths thrive only when their opponents die and a new generation grows up with them. When this theory was rather literally put to the test in the 2016 paper “Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?,” researchers found that, in fact, when elite scientists die, younger and lesser-known scientists are more likely to introduce novel ideas that push the field forward. Planck was right.

Older people tend to have deeper expertise in any given domain, and their contributions are not to be cast aside. But innovation requires something orthogonal to expertise—a kind of useful naïveté—that is more common among the young. America’s creeping gerontocracy across politics, business, and science might be constricting the emergence of new paradigms.

3. The rise of “vetocracy”

What if it’s not American creativity that’s suffering, but rather that modern institutions have found new successful ways to thwart and constrict creativity, so that new ideas are equally likely to be born, but less likely to grow?

In his “Build” essay, Andreessen blasted America’s inability to construct not only wondrous machines such as supersonic aircraft and flying cars but also sufficient houses, infrastructure, and megaprojects. In a compelling response, Ezra Klein wrote that “the institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it.” He continued:

They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector.

Last year, fewer bills were passed than in any year on record. From 1917 to 1970, the Senate took 49 votes to break filibusters, or less than one per year. Since 2010, it has had an average of 80 such votes annually. The Senate was once known as the “cooling saucer of democracy,” where populist notions went to chill out a bit. Now it’s the icebox of democracy, where legislation dies of hypothermia.

Vetocracy blocks new construction too, especially through endless environmental and safety-impact analyses that stop new projects before they can begin. “Since the 1970s, even as progressives have championed Big Government, they’ve worked tirelessly to put new checks on its power,” the historian Marc Dunkelman wrote. “The new protections [have] condemned new generations to live in civic infrastructure that is frozen in time.”

The best objection to everything that I’ve written so far is that there exists a world where young people tend to be in control, where regulatory burdens aren’t blocking megaprojects, and where new ideas are generally cherished and even, perhaps, fetishized. It’s the internet—or, more specific, the software industry. If you are working on AI, or crypto, or virtual reality, you probably aren’t starved for new ideas. You very well may be drowning in them.

Undeniably, the communications revolution has been the most significant fount of new ideas in the past half century. But the vitality of the tech industry in comparison with other industries points up that the U.S. innovation system has devolved from variety to specialization in the past 40 years or so. The U.S. used to produce a broad diversity of patents across many industries—chemistry, biology, and so forth—whereas patents today are more concentrated in a single industry, the software industry, than at any other time on record. We’ve funneled treasure and talent into the world of bits, as the world of flesh and steel has decayed around it. In the past 50 years, climate change has worsened, nuclear power has practically disappeared, construction productivity has slowed down, and the cost of developing new drugs has soared.

What I want is for the physical world to rediscover the virtue of experimentation. I want more new companies and entrepreneurs, which means I want more immigrants. I want more megaprojects in infrastructure and more moon-shot bets in energy and transportation. I want new ways of funding scientific research. I want non-grifters to find ways to innovate in higher education to bend the cost curve of college inflation. I want more prizes for audacious breakthroughs in cancer and Alzheimer’s and longevity research. As strange as this might sound, I want the federal government to get into the experimentation game too and found new agencies that identify and solve the problems that will be created by this riot of newness, as the CDC and DARPA once did. And, finally, I’d like Hollywood to rediscover a passion for cinematic blockbusters that don’t have numbers in the title.

theatlantic
Mame
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 12:35 pm
Here's another article explaining exactly why I don't like or respect the Prime Minister:

Justin Trudeau shouldn’t lecture attendees at the Summit for Democracy. He should take notes

The Prime Minister of Canada will be among the more than 100 world leaders in virtual attendance at U.S. President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy this week. It is reported he will treat the other leaders to a recitation of his government’s contributions to democracy, freedom and the rule of law in Canada: everything from “an enhanced emphasis on democracy in the digital space” to “reconciliation and anti-racism policies.”

The presumption is not only that Canada is a kind of democratic model for the world, but that the Prime Minister and the government he leads have been a force for its advancement. This requires, let us say, a certain degree of credulity.

This is the Prime Minister, after all, who won election in part on a promise of electoral reform, only to discard it when it proved inconvenient; who promised more free votes, yet whipped his caucus as strictly as any predecessor; who promised he would not bundle disparate pieces of legislation into mammoth omnibus bills or impose arbitrary time limits on debate, yet in government did both – sometimes limiting debate to pass omnibus bills.

This is the Prime Minister who has twice been found in violation of federal ethics laws; who improperly pressed the attorney-general of Canada to interfere in a criminal case on behalf of a firm with Liberal Party ties, SNC-Lavalin, then forced her and another minister out of the party for blowing the whistle on the affair; who prevented witnesses from testifying to what they knew of it, either to parliamentary committees or the RCMP.

This is the Prime Minister who ordered his MPs to stonewall two more parliamentary inquiries: one looking into the WE Charity scandal (where, again, his own conduct was central to the investigation), the other into the mysterious dismissal of two Chinese scientists from a top-security research laboratory in Winnipeg; who prorogued Parliament to cut short the first and dissolved it to put off the second, even going so far as to take the Speaker of the House to court rather than yield the documents Parliament had demanded.

This is the Prime Minister who tried, in his first government, to pass a package of changes to House rules (the infamous Motion 6) that would have effectively hamstrung Parliament; who attempted, in the pandemic’s panicky first weeks, to rush through a bill that would have allowed him to rule more or less by decree for two years; who, when this was rebuffed, failed to bring in a budget for more than two years; and who, even as he seeks authorization for billions more in public spending, has yet to table last year’s public accounts.

This is the Prime Minister on whose watch the Commons has sat for just 106 days a year on average – a fifth below the postwar average; who called a snap election, in defiance of the fixed-date provision of federal election law; who, after the election, waited a month to appoint a cabinet and two months to recall Parliament; whose ministers are on such a short leash that they are not even allowed to appoint their own chiefs of staff.

This is also the Prime Minister whose government has so failed to live up to its obligations under the federal Access to Information Act that it has been described by successive information commissioners as among the most secretive in our history.

In all, this is a Prime Minister who, in his attitude to Parliament and to parliamentary democracy, most closely resembles the prime minister he replaced, Stephen Harper. But Mr. Harper scowled and was mean to the press and was, let’s face it, a Conservative, where Justin Trudeau smiles and is kind to the press and is, let’s face it, a Liberal. Which may explain how he can lecture others on democracy, in the same way as he lectures others on sexual misconduct or racial insensitivity, without fear of ridicule.

Of course, the problems with Canadian democracy do not begin or end with this government, or this Prime Minister. In the powers our system reserves to the prime minister, particularly of appointment; in the relative weakness of Parliament versus the executive, and of MPs versus party leaders; and in the departures we allow from the fundamental principle of one person, one vote, whether because of the disparities in riding sizes or the distortions of first past the post – to say nothing of the continuing embarrassment, in the 21st century, of subjecting legislation to the approval of an appointed upper house – Canada has few lessons to teach the other democracies.

Not that that will stop us, or him.


https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-justin-trudeau-shouldnt-lecture-attendees-at-the-summit-for-democracy/

I like Andrew Coyne.
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 12:57 pm
@Mame,
I really wonder if there's any world leader liked and respected by a substantial majority of the electorate, let alone the world. Former chancellor Merkel? Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern? I get the feeling that they've pretty much all got pitch on their hands.
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 01:18 pm
@hightor,
Quote:
Re: georgeob1 (Post 7200133)
Quote:
Quote:
I don't recall seeing any "substantiation" in any the editorial opinion pieces you've posted here.


Um, that's why links to the source are provided.

Good christ in heaven.
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 01:23 pm
@hightor,
Now that's interesting!
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 01:53 pm
@Mame,
Quote:
I like Andrew Coyne.

I do too usually. But sorry, I'm not going to debate Canadian politics here (I never have) because I don't find it very interesting nor important (rather as I'm not terribly interested in Finland's politics). The exceptions will be where I see the worst aspects of American politics/ideology slithering across the sacred 49th. If you were to go through my library here, you would find exactly 0 books on our politics whereas fully half of what's here is directly related to the US.
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 02:18 pm
@georgeob1,
You know, George, I think the main reason I like you (and notice I didn't use quotation marks around "like") is that, having known you for so many years and as a close reader of your posts I know (not in quotations) that you have mixed feelings about being a prick.
snood
 
  0  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 02:26 pm
@blatham,
Whew. “Mixed feelings about being a prick”

There’s a bar for liking someone that I wouldn’t want to try limbo-ing under
0 Replies
 
Mame
 
  0  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 02:47 pm
@blatham,
Fair enough, blatham.
0 Replies
 
Mame
 
  0  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 02:58 pm
@hightor,
Well, I happened upon this today:

https://morningconsult.com/global-leader-approval/

The chart pasting didn't work, so you'll have to click on it, and only a few countries are listed, but the highest disapproval rating right now within their electorate is Boris Johnson with 65%, Macron with 58%, Bolsonaro with 57%, etc. Trudeau's is at 52%. Surprisingly, Nodi's is at 21%.

You make a good point, though. When we were going through "Trudeau-mania", his approval ratings were higher.
hightor
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 03:27 pm
@Mame,
I wouldn't have suspected that Modi would be that popular...interesting.
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  3  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 03:36 pm
Republicans, Wooing Trump Voters, Make Fauci Their Boogeyman

G.O.P. candidates, tapping into voters’ frustrations with a seemingly endless pandemic, are stepping up their attacks on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.

Quote:
COLUMBUS, Ohio — When Jane Timken kicked off an eight-week advertising campaign on the Fox News Channel in her bid for the Republican nomination for Senate, she did not focus on immigration, health care or the economy. Her first ad was titled “Fire Fauci.”

Its subject — Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus — is also under attack in Pennsylvania, where Mehmet Oz, a television doctor who has entered the Republican Senate primary there, calls him a “petty tyrant.” In Nebraska, an ad shows Jim Pillen, a Republican running for governor, dressed in hunting gear and cocking his gun after saying, “And Fauci? Don’t get me started.”

Republican attacks on Dr. Fauci are not new; former President Donald J. Trump, irked that the doctor publicly corrected his falsehoods about the virus, called him “a disaster” and repeatedly threatened to fire him. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, has grilled Dr. Fauci in nationally televised hearings, and Dr. Fauci — true to his fighter-from-Brooklyn roots — has punched back.

But as the 2022 midterm elections approach, the attacks have spread across the nation, intensifying as Dr. Fauci draws outsize attention in some of the most important state and local races on the ballot in November.

The Republican war on Dr. Fauci is partly a sign of Mr. Trump’s strong grip on the party. But Dr. Fauci, both his friends and detractors agree, has also become a symbol of something deeper — the deep schism in the country, mistrust in government and a brewing populist resentment of the elites, all made worse by the pandemic.

And Dr. Fauci, whose perpetual television appearances have made him the face of the Covid-19 response — and who is viewed by his critics as a high-and-mighty know-it-all who enjoys his celebrity — seems an obvious person to blame.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/02/03/us/politics/00DC-FAUCI-2/merlin_200202435_6d9c1b9a-5e06-4a84-afa7-2dd3307a36a3-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and has advised eight presidents. He has never revealed a party affiliation.

“Populism is essentially anti: anti-establishment, anti-expertise, anti-intellectual and anti-media,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, adding that Dr. Fauci “is an establishment expert intellectual who is in the media.”

For the 81-year-old immunologist, a venerated figure in the world of science, it is a jarring last chapter of a government career that has spanned half a century. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a post he has held since 1984, he has helped lead the response to various public health crises, including AIDS and Ebola, and advised eight presidents. He has never revealed a party affiliation. President George H.W. Bush once cited him as a hero.

Now, though, some voters are parroting right-wing commentators who compare Dr. Fauci to the brutal Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Candidates in hotly contested Republican primaries like Ohio’s are trying to out-Trump one another by supplanting Speaker Nancy Pelosi with Dr. Fauci as a political boogeyman.

In Pennsylvania, Dr. Oz recently ran a Twitter ad calling for a debate — not between candidates, but between him and Dr. Fauci. In Wisconsin, Kevin Nicholson, a onetime Democrat running for governor as a conservative outsider, says Dr. Fauci “should be fired and referred to prosecutors.”

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has released an advertisement last month telling Dr. Fauci to “pound sand” via the beach sandals the governor’s re-election campaign is now selling: “Freedom Over Fauci Flip-Flops.” Mr. DeSantis has coined a new term: “Faucism.” In Washington, lawmakers are taking aim at Dr. Fauci’s salary, finances and influence.

“I didn’t make myself a polarizing figure,” Dr. Fauci declared in an interview. “I’ve been demonized by people who are running away from the truth.”

The anti-Fauci fervor has taken its toll on his personal life; he has received death threats, his family has been harassed and his home in Washington is guarded by a security detail. His standing with the public has also suffered. In a recent NBC News Poll, just 40 percent of respondents said they trusted Dr. Fauci, down from 60 percent in April 2020.

Still, Mr. Ayres said, Dr. Fauci remains for many Americans “one of the most trusted voices regarding the pandemic.” In a Gallup poll at the end of 2021, his job approval rating was 52 percent. On a list of 10 officials, including Mr. Biden and congressional leaders, only two scored higher: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Republican strategists are split on whether attacking Dr. Fauci is a smart strategy. Mr. Ayres said it could help rev up the base in a primary but backfire in a general election, especially in a swing state like Ohio. But John Feehery, another strategist, said many pandemic-weary Americans viewed Dr. Fauci as “Mr. Lockdown,” and it made sense for Republicans “to run against both Fauci and lockdowns.”

Here in Ohio, Ms. Timken, a Harvard graduate and former chairwoman of the Ohio Republican Party who promises to “advance the Trump agenda without fear or hesitation,” is doing just that. Her ad shows a parent struggling to put a mask on a screaming toddler, which she brands “child abuse.”
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/02/03/us/politics/00DC-FAUCI-3/merlin_201149028_3fbc3d96-194e-48ec-9765-a778d309643b-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp
Ms. Timken is one of at least three Republican candidates for Ohio’s Senate seat who are going after Dr. Fauci.

The spot, she said in an interview, was prompted by what she hears from voters who are resentful of vaccine mandates, confused by shifting public health advice and tired of being told what to do.
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“It taps into the real frustration they feel,” Ms. Timken said, “that Fauci claims to be the bastion of science, but I think he’s playing God.”

She is one of three candidates with elite academic credentials who are going after Dr. Fauci in a crowded primary for the seat that Senator Rob Portman, a Republican, is giving up. The others are J.D. Vance, a lawyer with a Yale degree and the author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” and Josh Mandel, the former Ohio state treasurer, whose law degree is from Case Western Reserve University.

Mr. Vance called Dr. Fauci “a ridiculous tyrant” during a rally with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican banned from Twitter for spreading Covid misinformation. Mr. Mandel has railed against Dr. Fauci for months on Facebook and Twitter, calling him a liar and “one of the biggest frauds in American history.”

Ohio Republicans are split between the Trump wing and centrists in the mold of John Kasich, the former governor. Those tensions were on display last week at Tommy’s Diner, a Columbus institution, and at a meeting of the Franklin County Republican Committee, which convened to vote on endorsements. Sentiments seemed to track with vaccination status.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/02/03/us/politics/00DC-FAUCI-4/merlin_201148632_b9c57305-a116-4da1-9038-b780bb006fc9-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp
Mike Matthews, center, and George Wolf, right, are both vaccinated and didn’t find fault with Dr. Fauci. Andy Watkinson, at the table behind them, is unvaccinated and thinks Dr. Fauci “needs to retire.”

At the diner, Republicans like Mike Matthews, a retired state worker, and George Wolf, a retired firefighter, both of whom voted for Mr. Trump, found no fault with Dr. Fauci. Both are vaccinated. “I’ve never heard of anyone that I would trust more,” Mr. Wolf said.

But at the next table, Andy Watkinson, a remodeling contractor who is unvaccinated, said he was a fan of Joe Rogan, the podcaster, provocateur and Fauci critic. “I think he’s done the same thing for 50 years and he’s in bed with all the pharma companies,” Mr. Watkinson said of Dr. Fauci, though there is no evidence of that. “He needs to retire.”

At the committee meeting, views about Dr. Fauci were more strident.

“He needs to be brought up on charges,” declared Lisadiana Bates, a former business owner who is home-schooling her children. Echoing Dr. Robert Malone, who has become a conservative celebrity by arguing that Covid vaccine mandates are unethical experiments, she asserted that Dr. Fauci had “violated the Nuremberg Code,” the set of research ethics developed after the Holocaust.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/02/03/us/politics/00DC-FAUCI-5/merlin_201148851_2c46755f-67fd-4d8b-9030-86b98af4b1d9-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp
Lisadiana Bates, a former business owner who is home-schooling her children, asserted that Dr. Fauci had “violated the Nuremberg code,” the set of research ethics developed after the Holocaust.

The roots of anti-Fauci campaign rhetoric can be traced to Washington, where Dr. Fauci has clashed repeatedly with two Republican senators who are also doctors: Mr. Paul, an ophthalmologist, and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, an obstetrician.

Mr. Paul has fueled speculation that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak produced by federally funded “gain-of-function” research — high-risk studies aimed at making viruses more infectious — in Wuhan, China. Dr. Fauci and other National Institutes of Health officials have said that the Wuhan research did not meet the criteria for gain-of-function studies, and that it is genetically impossible for viruses studied there to have produced the pandemic.

The nuances of that dispute, however, have gotten lost in the increasingly hostile exchanges between the two men. In July, after Mr. Paul accused him of lying to Congress, Dr. Fauci shot back, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.” Last month, Dr. Fauci arrived at a Senate hearing brandishing a fund-raising webpage for Mr. Paul that included a “Fire Dr. Fauci” graphic, and accused Mr. Paul of exploiting the pandemic for political gain.

Later in that same hearing, Dr. Fauci muttered under his breath that Mr. Marshall was “a moron” — a comment caught on an open microphone — after the senator posted Dr. Fauci’s salary on a placard and demanded his financial disclosure forms, suggesting he might be engaged in financial “shenanigans” with the pharmaceutical industry.

(Dr. Fauci’s financial disclosure forms, which Mr. Marshall has since posted on the internet, show investments in bonds and mutual funds, not drug companies. He is paid an annual salary of $434,312 under a provision that allows government doctors and scientists to be highly compensated, akin to what they could earn in the private sector.)

Dr. Fauci said he did not regret the “moron” remark, or the pushback against Mr. Paul. But Ms. Timken said calling Mr. Marshall a moron was “beyond the pale.”

Even some Fauci fans in academia and government say he might have been better off keeping his cool to avoid amplifying his Republican critics and alienating voters who need to hear his public health message. Some suggest he lower his profile; he says the White House asks him to go on TV.

“He’s been pushing back in a way that is not common for us to see for American scientists, and I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

If Democrats lose seats in the midterm elections, as many expect, Dr. Fauci may have a Republican-controlled Congress to contend with. Another Republican from Ohio, Representative Jim Jordan, who claims that Dr. Fauci knew the coronavirus “came from a lab,” has vowed that Republicans will investigate him if they win control of the House.

Some of Dr. Fauci’s friends are urging him to avoid that possibility by retiring. He has been working on a memoir, but cannot look for a publisher while he is still a federal employee. Dr. Fauci says Republicans will not dictate the terms of his retirement, and he has no plans at the moment to step down. And, he said, he is not worried about any investigation.

“I can’t think of what they would want to investigate except this whole pile of lies that they’re throwing around,” he said.

nyt
snood
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 04:21 pm
@hightor,
They seem to have an abundance of boogeymen. CRT, Antifa, BLM, Pelosi, AOC, Fauci, Cheney and Kinzinger, on and on…

What’s glaringly obviously missing are proposals and policies for the good of people. That’s supposed to be their job, and it always seems to be the furthest thing from their mind.
Builder
 
  -1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 07:30 pm
@hightor,
Quote:
Republicans,Wooing Trump Voters, Make Fauci Their Boogeyman


He's a career liar, and a complete fraud, so he should fit right in.

Looks like Trudeau's security team are jumping ship.

Are you folks unaware of the situation in Ottawa?

Uncle Rupert is trying to keep it out of his press, but failing dismally.
glitterbag
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 07:40 pm
Thanks for all the happy cookies.
0 Replies
 
Glennn
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 07:55 pm
@Builder,
Quote:
Are you folks unaware of the situation in Ottawa?

Well yeah, it's been all over the news here!

Just kidding.

It seems that the press is bent on . . . not really being the press.
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 08:01 pm
@snood,
Quote:
They seem to have an abundance of boogeymen. CRT, Antifa, BLM, Pelosi, AOC, Fauci, Cheney and Kinzinger, on and on…

Yup. Everything has to be personalized. It helps to avoid any embarrassing admission of systemic failure.
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  1  
Reply Mon 7 Feb, 2022 08:15 pm
@Builder,
Quote:
Are you folks unaware of the situation in Ottawa?


No. You're unaware that it was brought to the board's attention as early as Sat 29 Jan, 2022 07:58 am.
Builder
 
  -1  
Reply Tue 8 Feb, 2022 03:08 am
@Glennn,
Quote:
It seems that the press is bent on . . . not really being the press.


It's actually very important for people to see how badly the "press" is covering up reality in many sectors today.

We know they're part of the criminal corporate cabal, and it's crucial that their role is exposed.

Part of the awakening process for many people.

I don't expect the core crew here to pay any attention.
Let them sleep on it.
 

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