The Byron Donalds Interview

 by Amber Duke

It’s not exactly breaking news that young Americans are angry about the economy.

What is interesting is who they’re increasingly willing to listen to.

On the left, DSA-backed candidates are winning support by promising to take on landlords, corporations, insurers and other powerful interests they blame for making ordinary life unaffordable.

On the right, James Fishback built a surprisingly energetic following among young Republicans by arguing that the economic system is failing people who want to buy a home, start a family and build wealth.

So I asked Rep. Byron Donalds, the GOP nominee for Florida governor, what both groups are tapping into.

“Young people want to know that there’s a plan for their success,” Donalds told me.

The three-term congressman said the appeal of socialist candidates is not particularly complicated to understand.

People want affordable prices and “a shot at building the American dream for themselves,” he said in a Thursday phone interview. The left, he argued, has figured out how to sell itself as the force willing to “fight for the little guy.”

The problem, according to Donalds, is what their policies actually entail.

“When you look into the details of what they’re going to do, the policy is ridiculous,” he said. “It simply will not work. And what you end up doing is you cause more problems for working families … not less problems.”

Donalds argues DSA-style candidates are asking voters to hand the government more economic power without demonstrating they have the experience or judgment to wield it effectively.

But his broader argument is that Republicans cannot compete with that message by offering young voters an anti-socialism lecture and little else.

Donalds’ own primary gave him a test case. Fishback built a coalition of young Republicans, particularly on college campuses. When I asked Donalds what he thought Fishback had tapped into, he said the appeal came down to whether young people believe there is still a path forward for them.

“I think if anything resonated, it is that young people want to know that there’s a plan for their success,” Donalds said. “Whether you’re going to college or not going to college, we want to make sure every child in our state, every young adult in our state, has a chance to build, you know, the Florida dream for themselves.”

Donalds said that starts with housing, where he wants to lower permitting costs for people “trying to get into the game of housing,” and with career pathways that don’t depend on a four-year degree.

“Making sure that teenagers and even if you’re out of high school, that they can get access to an internship and apprenticeship to be able to have a high-paying job when they graduate high school, or getting them into a training program right after high school,” he offered as an example.

The Congressman also argued colleges need to be more honest about the economic value of what students are studying.

“Let’s make sure kids are graduating with degrees that have economic value,” Donalds said. “Just don’t give them a degree and say that they hit the lottery, and then when they go into the real world, they realize that it’s hard for them to make ends meet.”

Immigration is also part of the economic equation. Donalds reiterated his support for eliminating the H-1B visa program and said the U.S. needs to return to a quota system for legal immigration to make sure American workers are protected from foreign competition.

I also asked whether that “Americans first” approach should extend to employers, including industries such as agriculture and hospitality that have pushed back against aggressive worksite enforcement.

“I think with where the country is, we have to have enforcement across the board,” Donalds said. “The reality is that we have to make sure that immigration is working for the American people first.”

Donalds also argued that family formation is part of the economic answer.

“The last piece, and this is what only a young person can control, the number one way to make sure you’re not living in poverty: get married and have kids,” he asserted.

Donalds’ affordability pitch is also where he draws the clearest contrast with his Democratic opponent, David Jolly.

Jolly has likewise made affordability central to his campaign, but Donalds dismissed much of his agenda as heavy on rhetoric and light on details.

“The biggest difference is he says the word, but there’s no details,” Donalds told me. “It’s great to say the word affordability, but what are the details? What are the facts? What are you going to do?”

He pointed to Jolly’s proposal to take a state-backed approach to catastrophic property-insurance risk.

“If the state of Florida takes on all of that risk, what ends up happening is either you’d have to borrow billions and billions of dollars … or you’re going to have to, frankly, create new taxes in our state, create a hurricane tax,” he said.

But winning that argument requires more than attacking Jolly. Donalds also has to explain how Florida itself can remain a place where young people can build wealth.

For decades, Florida benefited enormously from wealthy retirees moving south. I asked Donalds what happens as the Baby Boomer generation shrinks and that model becomes less dominant.

“We’re not a retirement state anymore. We’re an everything state,” Donalds said.

Donalds pointed to manufacturing, commercial space, finance, biomedical research, aerospace and defense as evidence that Florida’s economy is already diversifying.

“We’re the 14th largest economy in the world right now,” he said. “We’re on our way to being a top 10 global economy.”

And Donalds argued that the diversification of Florida’s economy should open up opportunities for people to actually build lives there.

Jobs alone, of course, do not solve the problem if young Floridians still cannot afford homes. Donalds wants to attack housing costs from several directions.

He told me roughly 30 percent of the cost of a new home is attributable to government regulation and said he wants to streamline permitting and reduce delays that drive up construction costs. He also wants to lower or potentially eliminate property taxes for homesteaded properties — a proposal I pressed him on because of the critique that it merely widens the wealth gap between older homeowners and young people trying to break into the market.

“I would say that criticism just doesn’t hold water,” he argued. “Number one, anybody that’s bought [a home], it’s not just a down payment on the house. It’s also escrow, and you have to escrow property taxes and, quite frankly, also insurance when you go to the closing table. Anything we can do to lower that burden for working families in our state, especially young families, that helps them be able to own a home for the first time.”

Donalds acknowledged that older Floridians have had more time to accumulate wealth, but said that doesn’t mean tax relief is unfair.

“When my wife and I started out, we didn’t have any money,” he said. “We had a 925 square foot apartment. We were working two jobs, both of us, before our first child was born, and that’s just what you did. You worked hard, and I think every generation has to go through that.”

Housing affordability does not have a single cause, Donalds suggested, when I asked whether insufficient supply is the biggest driver of rising prices.

“You have to examine each aspect of Florida’s housing economy and how can you make it more efficient and how can you make it better,” Donalds said. “We need a strategy of how we’re going to manage growth in our state over the next 10, 20, and 30 years. How are we going to build workforce housing? How are we going to build entry-level single-family home housing?”

The question of how to tackle Florida’s massive growth is hard to avoid. Florida has spent years absorbing rapid population growth alongside a steady influx of new businesses. Is there a point, I asked, at which Florida needs to pivot from attracting more growth to focusing on the people already there?

“There’s a lot of talk in Florida politics about building a wall between us and Georgia,” Donalds said wryly. “You can’t do that. We’re a part of the United States of America.”

People are going to keep coming, he argued, because Florida remains a “common sense state” built around law and order, family values and conservative policy. The better answer, in his view, is to build the infrastructure and housing necessary to absorb that growth.

“How do we efficiently build out the infrastructure we need when it comes to roads?” Donalds said. “How do you design and figure out where you’re going to put some of the entry-level housing, workforce housing that you need, so you have the inventory supply?”

Donalds is betting that Florida does not have to choose between remaining a magnet for growth and being a place where a young person can build a life. The challenge is proving it to young voters who increasingly feel both political parties are doing a poor job of addressing their ability to get ahead.

This economic anxiety was also part of the coalition Trump assembled in 2024. His gains among younger voters were not based solely on cultural issues. Trump increasingly framed trade, immigration and industrial policy around a simple question: Is the American economy actually working for Americans?

That marked a real departure from the older Republican habit of treating economic growth as the ultimate good. Trump’s version of the GOP asked a second question — who is benefiting from that growth?

Donalds believes that shift is permanent.

“I think having a conservative-principled, quasi-populist party — or movement, not even a party, movement — I think that’s here to stay,” he said.

What worries him instead is that some Republicans might grow “softer” without Trump’s example.

“You can push back. You can fight back,” Donalds said. “My hope is that the same level of toughness and courage remains.”

Toughness is important, but ultimately the GOP has to prove to a new generation of voters that it can do more than fight the left. It has to offer a convincing vision for how young Americans can get ahead.

“We got to be honest with young people. We got to tell them the truth. Be straight with them, and know that there is a way to be successful,” Donalds said.

https://stateoftheday.us/p/the-byron-donalds-interview

What Should Universities Teach?

 

Shai Goldman’s “Ignorance and Conviction at Columbia” rightly dings the modern educational obsession with “critical thinking,” which in practice is “analytical thinking” with a bolshie chip on the shoulder. I am certainly willing to believe that Columbia students are trained to speak confidently from superficial knowledge. I will say, however, that family lore holds that criticisms of superficiality at Columbia go back at least to the 1920s, when the content of their superficial knowledge was somewhat better.

But I think there’s more to be said about what universities—and K-12 schools—should teach, beyond pointing out the flaws of “critical thinking.” Universities should focus on two pedagogical keywords: understanding and proportion. These, not “critical thinking,” are crucial for undergraduates.

Students need to be taught to understand—the Iliad and the Crusades, the Bible and the anthropology of the Yanomami. They should know historical facts and literary texts; they should understand the motivations of historical participants, and they should understand the intentions of artistic creators. They should understand both objective truths and subjective intentions.

Teaching understanding should not be reduced to subjective intentions. Communists may have intended to create heaven on earth, but students should know that they actually created an archipelago of hells. But understanding must include a knowledge of fact and intention as a prerequisite to analysis—and, indeed, critique.

Analysis is a useful tool by which to achieve understanding. Critique is a plausible outcome of learning to analyze, as is appreciation. But what teachers should provide is the backbone of fact needed for understanding, taught in such a way as to disseminate understanding. Analytical thinking and critical thinking are only means to the end of understanding.

Students, as Cardinal Newman wrote in The Idea of a University, also need to be taught a sense of proportion.

Anyone can and should study by himself, but autodidactic study characteristically lacks proportion, which fails to give students a sense of the place and importance of what they learn. University education should give students this sense of proportion. The point of teaching exemplary masterpieces in survey courses is meant to provide that sense of proportion when students read on their own. Students who have read Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Yeats will begin to be able to judge the importance and the quality of the latest novel. The point of teaching a core curriculum is to provide a sense of proportion about the importance of each discipline within university knowledge as a whole.

Then, too, a central point of teaching analytical—and critical—thinking is to equip students, not least as potential future professors, to argue for changes to the core. What we know and value does change, generation by generation; a core curriculum should be Burkean, amenable to reform. But students should learn what the core is, to understand what it aims to convey, as a prerequisite to proposing amendments to it.

Professors can abuse the principle of proportion: a proportionate education includes Foucault but not the Bible. But any principle can be travestied. Colleges and universities should aim to teach a sense of proportion, and citizens should keep an eye on universities to make sure they’re not using the word as camouflage for radical bilge.

When we criticize university teaching, we should have clear principles in mind of what universities should aim at when they teach. Understanding and proportion are those aims. “Analytical thinking” will help with these goals; “critical thinking” may be a product of acquiring understanding and proportion; but understanding and proportion are what universities should aim to teach students.

David Randall is Director of Research at the National Association of Scholars and Executive Director of the Civics Alliance.

https://mindingthecampus.org/2026/09/02/what-should-universities-teach/

The Shifting Landscape of Islamist Terror Since 2001

 Twenty-five years after 9/11, the United States faces a disquieting paradox. On the one hand, the country has largely been spared another major terrorist attack. Only one lethal incident directed by a foreign terrorist organization has succeeded on American soil since 9/11: the 2019 shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola by a Saudi al-Qaeda operative, which killed three sailors and wounded eight others. This record is a towering achievement. In the dark and fearful days after 9/11 and during the early years of the war on terror, such an outcome was a matter of hope rather than certainty. The horrific attacks in Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Mumbai in 2008, Paris in 2015, Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday in 2019, and Moscow in 2024 underscore the importance of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 in keeping the United States safe from another catastrophic attack.

On the other hand, the broader war on terror has produced a more troubling, and still unresolved, outcome. Al-Qaeda survived, spawning a global network of franchises, allies, and even more lethal offshoots. A decade ago, its Iraqi affiliate, rebranded as the Islamic State, resurrected the long-defunct but deeply venerated Muslim caliphate: the supranational political-religious authority governed by Islamic law (Sharia). At its peak, the Islamic State controlled some 40,000 square miles and ruled nearly 8 million people across Iraq and Syria. After a five-year campaign involving some 90 countries, the group was ultimately defeated. But the ideology—and divinely ordained narrative—that sustained it, and has long guided al-Qaeda, remains a force driving both organizations.

The situation today therefore remains worrisome. The Taliban again rules Afghanistan, with al-Qaeda reportedly having recently reestablished its pre-9/11 terrorist training camp at Tarnak Farm. Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Sahel, JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims), has besieged Mali’s capital and threatens to overrun the country. In East Africa, al-Shabaab continues to undermine the stability of the Somali government, while the Islamic State’s network of branches wages violent campaigns across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In recent years, its adherents have carried out attacks in countries as diverse as Iran, Turkey, Russia, and the United States.

Two factors explain the resilience of the Salafi-jihadi terrorist movement. The first is ideology. Both al-Qaeda and ISIS draw from the same intellectual tradition, rooted in the conviction that Muslims are under siege from foreign infidels, corrupt apostate regimes, and a Western liberal order fundamentally hostile to Islam. That worldview was most powerfully articulated by Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian-Jordanian cleric who became Osama bin Laden’s mentor. Building on the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyyah’s treatise The Religious and Moral Doctrine of Jihad and the writings of his own mentor, the Egyptian Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb—especially his seminal work Milestones—Azzam transformed the concept of fard ayn, the individual Muslim’s obligation to defend the faith wherever it is threatened, into a universal call to arms. Azzam was assassinated in 1989, but the clash-of-civilizations framework that he advanced remains the ideological bedrock of both organizations.

The second factor is organizational adaptation. After al-Qaeda’s core leadership was decimated following 9/11, the group devolved authority to regional franchises. Within eight years, for example, its affiliate in Yemen, AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), had surpassed the parent organization as the most serious terrorist threat to the United States and its allies. ISIS replicated that model less than a decade later, dispersing into 33 formal “provinces” across nearly a dozen countries. This decentralized structure has enabled both groups to absorb repeated military setbacks while continuing to marshal fighters and resources to prosecute the war that bin Laden declared 30 years ago.

The differences between al-Qaeda and ISIS have always been more tactical and hence stylistic than strategic or substantive—matters of tone, not ideology or outcome. Both reject democracy as incompatible with Islamic governance, both seek the restoration of a caliphate under strict Sharia law, and both frame Western influence and intervention in Muslim lands as necessitating violent resistance. When the Islamic State’s founder and leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced the caliphate in June 2014 and declared himself caliph, he was not departing from bin Laden’s vision but accelerating it.

Taliban security personnel stand guard near the Torkham border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan (Photo by Aimal Zahir / AFP via Getty Images)

With this bold move, al-Baghdadi dramatically upstaged al-Qaeda. His aim was to achieve what bin Laden had only promised: nothing less than redrawing the map of the Middle East, erasing the artificial states and borders created by the Western powers after World War I, and laying the foundation for the resurrection of a Muslim empire stretching from Spain across North Africa, through the Middle East and the Caucasus, into South and Southeast Asia.

Though the new caliphate proved short-lived and ultimately fell to the international coalition arrayed against it, the surviving remnants of the Islamic State continue to derive satisfaction from having withstood the combined power of a massive coalition led by the most technologically advanced military in history: the U.S. armed forces. In one of his last publicly released video addresses, in 2004, bin Laden similarly boasted that al-Qaeda had defeated the Red Army in Afghanistan and forced its withdrawal in 1989. He even claimed to have set in motion the chain of events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of Communism as a global ideology. Having survived the war on terror proclaimed by President George W. Bush, al-Qaeda, bin Laden argued, had demonstrated that the same fate would eventually befall the world’s other superpower, the United States. For both ISIS and al-Qaeda, their continued existence reinforces the narrative that the ultimate triumph of Salafi-jihadism is divinely ordained.

If bin Laden were alive today, he might well be pleased. The enterprise he launched in August 1988 has survived decades of sustained, international counterterrorism pressure. And it continues to inspire violence and resistance, attracting new recruits and supporters who were not even alive on September 11, 2001. This is exactly what bin Laden’s chief bodyguard, Abu Jandal, said would happen. “In case of his death, I think he will be a symbol for all those who follow him,” Abu Jandal told bin Laden’s biographer, journalist Peter Bergen, as recounted in Bergen’s The Osama bin Laden I Know. “His death will be a great force for stirring up everybody’s emotions and enthusiasm to follow him on the path to martyrdom.”

The result, a quarter-century after the epochal 9/11 attacks, is a movement that has defied predictions of its demise. It has franchised itself across continents, recruited fighters born after 9/11, and sustained an ideology compelling enough to inspire violence from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Protecting the American homeland has been a success. Defeating the movement that made 9/11 possible has not—at least, not yet.

Bruce Hoffman is a professor in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/war-on-terror-taliban-al-qaeda-islam

Latest Hit Piece Shows Bias of the Welfare-Industrial Complex

 by Chris Jacobs

The media never fail to amaze. Even after decades in Washington, one remains astounded at the ways in which they contort reality to meet their ideological narrative.

That’s the takeaway from a recent article outlining one element of last year’s budget reconciliation law. The story blamed President Trump for implementing a law passed by Congress, and bemoaned the fact that states might not get to use the Medicaid program to engage in more questionable cash grabs from the federal government.

Waiver Approval Process

Congress enacted the provision in question in Section 71118 of last year’s budget reconciliation law. Simply put, the provision requires all states seeking approval or renewal of Medicaid waivers — which currently encompass roughly one-third of Medicaid spending — to receive a certification from the Medicare actuary that their waiver will not increase federal spending.

On this matter, I will readily declare my biases. Having publicly suggested this provision the week after the November 2024 election as a reform Congress could enact, I supported it from the get-go and believe it will yield good policy. By contrast, Phil Galewitz, the reporter for KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) Health News, evidently opposes the measure — but won’t come out and say so outright.

He starts by naming Trump no fewer than nine separate times in the article itself, not to mention the headline: “Trump Team’s Use of Arcane Budget Rule Threatens Medicaid Coverage.” Even though the provision at issue was passed by Congress, the article refers to “Trump’s signature tax-and-spending law,” and “Trump’s law.” The framing seems particularly ironic: for all the left’s talk about Trump riding roughshod over Congress and threatening democracy, they sure seem willing to overlook Congress’ role in enacting legislation — that is, when they believe it suits their ideological purposes.

Likewise, the article implied that the administration recently concocted some dastardly plot to upend the Medicaid program:

Pivoting from the long-standing practice of checking only retroactively whether states were keeping their budget promises, the Trump administration said in June that it would not renew or approve any waivers unless the CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] first certifies that they would not increase costs to the federal government.

Except this supposed “pivot” was made to comply with the law. Section 71118 is clear: “Beginning January 1 2027, the Secretary may not approve an application for (or renewal or amendment of)” a Medicaid waiver without a certification of budget neutrality from the actuary. Again, it’s funny how the same people accusing the Trump administration of running a would-be dictatorship attack it for upholding the law — just because this law happens to offend the welfare-industrial complex.

Stop Overspending

The article quotes various experts raising doomsday scenarios about both the legislative provision and the administration’s interpretation of it:

• “What we have here is a sneaky way to cut Medicaid expansion and the Medicaid program.”

• States will have to clear more bureaucratic hurdles.… That could lead to fewer benefits or reduce the number of people eligible for Medicaid.

• Many long-standing waivers that have been renewed multiple times are now at risk and … the loss of state waivers could threaten money hospitals rely on to cover uninsured patients and improve care in their communities.

But as I previously noted, these types of waivers have been ripe for abuse and politicization. In 2014, the Government Accountability Office concluded that federal officials approved $778 million in excess spending for an Arkansas Medicaid waiver — the Obama administration essentially using additional taxpayer dollars to bribe Arkansas into expanding Medicaid under Obamacare. (In 2024, I also proposed requiring budget-neutrality for Medicare waivers — so as to prevent a reprise of the Biden administration’s bailout of insurers offering Medicare prescription drug coverage — but Congress sadly has not yet enacted it.) The KFF article does mention this fact — but not until its 25^th paragraph.

To their credit, Arkansas Medicaid officials in the administration of Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders are trying to clean up the mess left by then-Gov. Mike Beebe, D-Ark., when he and the Arkansas legislature accepted the federal bailout to expand Obamacare. Arkansas officials are working to modify the Medicaid waiver to ensure it doesn’t cost the federal government additional money.

But the other experts quoted in Galewitz’s article — to say nothing of blue states that will face the same dilemma Arkansas does as their Medicaid waivers come up for renewal — are making a disingenuous argument. All their talk about “cuts” and added burdens ignores the fact that state Medicaid programs never should have received additional federal dollars like the extra money awarded to Arkansas in the first place. Obsessing about the former to the exclusion of the latter amounts to a blunt, albeit tacit, admission: “We stole that money fair and square!”

I explained last year how think tanks like KFF don’t really care about fraud, so long as that fraud results in more people obtaining “coverage.” The recent story amounts to a reprise of the genre: it matters little that states are bilking the federal government for money they don’t deserve, so long as that money goes toward supporting the welfare state. The taxpayers footing the bill for this additional, unjustified spending might beg to differ.

https://juniperresearchgroup.substack.com/p/latest-hit-piece-shows-bias-of-the

NJ Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell under investigation for alleged inappropriate behavior toward women: reports

 New Jersey Democratic Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell is reportedly the subject of an internal investigation over allegations of inappropriate behavior toward women and potential ethics violations. 

The probe was launched by Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s office and is being led by former New Jersey Attorney General Christopher Porrino, according to multiple outlets. 

Porrino’s team is currently interviewing witnesses and complainants and is probing whether Caldwell inappropriately offered people state jobs, the New Jersey Globe first-reported on Friday. 

Republicans are calling for Caldwell to temporarily step down from his role amid the probe.Getty Images

“The Governor would take any reports of inappropriate behavior or misconduct extremely seriously and expects our public officials to hold themselves to the highest standards,” a Sherrill spokesperson told NJ.com.  

The spokesperson declined to “confirm or deny potential personnel matters.”

Caldwell did not respond to the outlet’s request for comment. 

The inquiry comes just seven months after Sherrill and Caldwell were sworn in. 

In July 2025, Sherrill lauded Caldwell as “voice for the voiceless” and someone who is “committed to New Jersey” when she tapped him to be her running mate against Republican Jack Ciattarelli. 

“I’m proud to select Dale Caldwell as my Lieutenant Governor running mate because we share a commitment to public service and challenging the status quo,” Sherrill said at the time. “Dale is the son of civil rights leaders who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma — and he’s followed in his parents’ footsteps and he has always been a voice for the voiceless.”

Caldwell was Sherrill’s running mate in last year’s New Jersey gubernatorial race.Anadolu via Getty Images

New Jersey Republicans have demanded that Caldwell, who is also the Secretary of State, be placed on leave while the investigation plays out. 

“Considering the complex duties of his position, Lt. Gov. Caldwell should temporarily step down from his duties as Lieutenant Governor,” GOP state Senate leader Anthony Bucco wrote on X.

Bucco described the allegations against Caldwell as “deeply concerning and disappointing” and fumed that reports of the investigation came out just before the long Labor Day weekend. 

“The public deserves transparency and timely information about matters of this magnitude,” he said. “There are legitimate questions about why this information was not disclosed sooner and why we are just learning about this late on Friday heading into a holiday weekend.”

https://nypost.com/2026/09/04/us-news/nj-lt-gov-dale-caldwell-under-investigation-for-alleged-inappropriate-behavior-toward-women-report/

COVID Collaborators

 By Lloyd Billingsley

On Jan. 19, 2025, Joe Biden issued an executive grant of clemency for Dr. Anthony Fauci, a government bureaucrat since 1968 and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. On July 29, 2026, before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, chaired by physician and Senator Rand Paul, Fauci refused to answer any questions and pleaded the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. Last month, Senator Ron Johnson sought to have the former NIAID boss testify before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Fauci rejected the request, but this does not exhaust the investigative possibilities.

The government’s first COVID mouthpiece was Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). Dr. Messonnier’s series of telephone briefings in early 2020 set forth everything Fauci would say, starting on Jan. 17 with the claim that the “novel coronavirus” emerged from a “market” in Wuhan. In February and March, Messonnier warned that there was no immunity and that there would be “community spread.” Schools and business would have to be shut down, with possible loss of income for Americans, who needed to avoid mass gatherings.

The CDC had a team in China for many years, said Messonnier, who was careful to compliment China’s handling of the outbreak. On the other hand, Messonnier told reporters she was “not at liberty” to speak about travel to the United States from Wuhan.  

In May2021, Messonnier suddenly resigned from the CDC. Biden’s CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, hailed the NCIRD boss as a “true hero.” Messonnier moved on to the Skoll Foundation as executive director for pandemic prevention and health systems, but some members of Congress remained curious about her performance with the CDC. 

On Oct. 8, 2021, Messonnier testified to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, accompanied by three attorneys from the WilmerHale law firm. Messonnier was not sworn in but was instructed to answer truthfully because false statements could lead to “criminal prosecution.” As the redacted transcript reveals, one of Messonnier’s attorneys advised her not to answer a question about a telephone call with CDC Director Robert Redfield. The Trump pick, an experienced virologist, saw evidence of laboratory origin for COVID, and in June 2021 Redfield said he received death threats from fellow scientists because he spoke up about it.

The committee was eager to know if Messonnier, the sister of Justice Department official Rod Rosenstein, experienced any interference from the Trump White House. Messonnier said there was no interference and provided key revelations that the committee failed to pursue.

Messonnier began her career with the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a legion of disease detectives tasked with preventing epidemics from arriving in America. Messonnier’s series of telebriefings were carefully scripted by a “communications team” of Dan Jernigan, Anne Schuchat, and Jay Butler. Messonnier did not reveal that they were all veterans of the EIS, and so was Dr. Marty Cetron, a participant in several briefings. Anne Schuchat was a special case.

Without Senate confirmation, Schuchat served as acting CDC director from Jan. 20 to July 7 in 2017 and Jan. 31 to March 26 in 2018. That year, CDC Chief Operating Officer Sherri Berger appointed Schuchat, hailing the EIS veteran as “our Anthony Fauci,” with the NIAID boss praising her “high level of competence and integrity.”

In January 2020, Schuchat was Principal Deputy Director of the CDC and believed to be in line for the top job. Even so, Schuchat suddenly resigned from the CDC in May 2021, the same month as Messonnier. Both women have been members of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, Schuchat a rear admiral and Messonnier a captain. Both have appeared in military-style uniforms, chests emblazoned with medals. In those elite ranks, the EIS vets have plenty of company.

Pediatrician Richard Levine, a Harvard alum, believed he was really a woman and began calling himself Rachel Levine. In 2021, Levine became an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service and Joe Biden made him assistant secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services. In that role, Levine recommended elective mutilations such as penectomy and vaginoplasty as “medically necessary, safe and effective.” So, Ivy League degrees and high government posts are no guarantee of medical and scientific integrity.

Veterans of the vaunted Epidemic Intelligence Service brokered the COVID pandemic with no revelation of their EIS connection or the composition of the “service.”  As it happens, the EIS includes nationals from many nations, including the People’s Republic of China. Whose interests the Chinese EIS officers represent has never been explained to the American people.

According to an October 2020 ProPublica article titled “Inside the Fall of the CDC,” during COVID the American and Chinese CDC “were almost seen as one.” So, no surprise that Messonnier praised China and essentially parroted PRC talking points. The EIS veterans had to know about evidence of a laboratory origin, but dutifully flagged the “Wuhan market” as the source. The bemedaled Messonnier was “not at liberty” to discuss the issue of travel to the United States from Wuhan. That order doubtless came from “admiral” Schuchat, the CDC’s very own Anthony Fauci.

Like medical doctors Fauci and Messonnier, Schuchat’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry, so strictly speaking she is not a virologist. By all indications, doctors Fauci, Schuchat, and Messonnier never treated a single COVID patient. Unlike Dr. Fauci, Schuchat and Messonnier did not receive presidential pardons. Senators Paul and Johnson should now subpoena them to testify under oath. 

What did the CDC and EIS know about the true origin of COVID and when did they know it? Were any EIS officers working within the CDC team in China and for how many years? Was anybody in the CDC or EIS demoted, disciplined, or dismissed over the failure to stop the COVID virus? What was it about travel from Wuhan that Messonnier was “not at liberty” to discuss? How, exactly, was the “novel coronavirus” vectored to the United States? 

Why did Messonnier and Schuchat suddenly retire in 2021? When did CDC and EIS bosses know that Fauci funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research? And so on. Any untruthful answers they may give to these questions before Congress would raise the possibility of criminal prosecution.

The American people, who suffered so much during COVID, can be forgiven for suspecting a massive coverup. And if anybody thought the initials CDC meant Center for Deception Control, it would be hard to blame them. It is time that someone is held accountable and for serious reform of the CDC.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/covid-collaborators/