A kill shot for Fauci? Fox News goes full fascist

Jesse Watters of Fox News, speaking to an ultra-right-wing crowd at a Turning Point USA AmericaFest event, said the way to deal with Dr. Anthony Fauci is to ambush him, then deliver a “kill shot.” Kill shot, or coup de grace, is part of the lexicon of mafia assassins and fascist executioners, not journalists.

The Associated Press, which posted the story on its web site, describes the context of the comments:

“Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the government’s most visible spokesman on the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the subject of frequent criticism by some Fox News commentators who have been seeking to appeal to audience members resistant to vaccinations.

“Watters said that Fauci should be confronted on the subject of whether the National Institute of Health funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the COVID-19 virus originated. He said an interviewer should suggest he lied about the topic — something Fauci has disputed.

“‘Now you go in for the kill shot, the kill shot with an ambush, deadly, because he doesn’t see it coming,’ Watters said.

“He suggested an interviewer say, ‘you know why people don’t trust you, don’t you?’ Oh, he is dead. He’s dead. He’s done.”

Characteristically, Fox News (which I have always thought of as Faux News, or False News, and from now on will think of as Fascist News) defended Watters.

This is all so vile, false, irresponsible, and malicious I don’t know whether to scream, cry, or vomit. At a time when we have seen ideologically driven hate murders from the streets of Charlottesville to a Pittsburgh synagogue, to several Black churches, and a department store parking lot in El Paso filled with Latinos, sharing a homicidal fantasy with assembled fanatics ought to be a crime. In fact, Watters was conscious he was pushing the envelope, as he advised the audience “just make sure it’s legal.”

How to unpack this bunch of crap?  Start with the motive. Watters and his colleagues at Fascist News are “seeking to appeal to audience members resistant to vaccinations.” What it amounts to is collusion with Covid for commercial ends at the expense of the lives and health of people. All this as a deadly pandemic rages out of control. That is at low as it gets in any business, more so in journalism, which deals with finding truth and speaking it.

Then move to the method. This is classic fact-free conspiracy theory meant to mislead and activate paranoid fears, suggest motives so twisted and evil as to justify aggression. Fauci’s National Institute of Health office funded the Chinese to engineer a deadly virus to deploy against the American people. Lunatic lies.

The only problem with this theory is everything — no evidence! The inconvenient question of why the Chinese would allow themselves to be hit first with a virus they had created as a weapon. And why would a country with the most to lose, the biggest population in the world and one of the fastest growing economies, play with fire?

The logic of Fascist News and its fans is a piece of work too. Covid is a hoax but nevertheless we need to blame someone for it. The Red Chinese and the smarty-pants egghead scientists like Fauci working hand-in-hand with them to hurt team America are convenient scapegoats.

But the reality is one in which, as Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” There is no objective reason for 100 percent of the eligible population of the country not to have already been vaccinated and received a booster, which are free and widely available. Yet, once again people are ending up in the hospital and dying there from Covid-19, needlessly, from an obstinate and irrational dread of the vaccine driven by misinformation pushed by those who profit economically or politically from delusion and confusion.

Demonizing Fauci has become the favorite sport of Fascist News and the right-wing in general, soccer for reactionary hooligans. Rightists like to blame the poor for their poverty while refusing to provide everybody with a leg up in the form of free community college. Blaming Fauci for Covid-19 takes it one step farther.

Fauci has done more than anybody to fight Covid. He almost alone stood up to the lies and mad megalomania of Trump. His long career has been an ultramarathon fighting the worst infectious diseases, including AIDS. The AIDS activists that savaged him early on later lionized him because he had the courage to confront their just criticisms, acknowledge them, and respond accordingly.

The fascists will never do this. They have no justified grievances against Fauci, only an abiding desire to deflect blame from Trump’s criminal conduct on Covid. This is pathetic. Fauci has the overwhelming admiration of his scientific peers all over the world while Trump is widely scorned by democratic leaders the planet over.

Defamation and violence are the first and last resort of fascists like those at False News. Tucker Carlson compared Fauci with Mussolini. Mussolini? Self-effacing Fauci is the antithesis of the Italian fascist leader while Trump, Carlson’s idol, was the embodiment of old Benito, from his aggressive posture to his histrionics.

Another Fascist News pseudo-journalist, Lara Logan, compared Fauci with the Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, who used Jews and others in death camps to perform cruel experiments. Compared to Carlson, Logan seems to be groping for some truth, through a glass darkly. Fauci has never been political and does not have the traits of the dictator-type. But he is a doctor like Mengele. There all similarity stops. At the most elementary scientific level, epidemiologists generally don’t carry out experiments; they analyze data. Morally, Fauci is Doctor life, Mengele was Dr. Death. Full stop.

The level of depravity on the right and in the Republican Party has reached a level surpassed previously only by hate organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi party. Their designs are despicable, aiming to steal elections while claiming to be trying to prevent the other side from committing fraud. The right has become so unmoored from truth in defending the indefensible—Trump, collaboration with Covid, multi-million tax cuts for billionaires and peanuts for everybody else—that now they deny that there is a Covid-19 freight train heading straight for their unvaccinated selves.

Do what you want, right-wingers. You want to die? I won’t deny you that “freedom.” Just don’t blame Fauci, the Chinese, or anyone else for your self-annihilation.

History repeats itself twice, first as tragedy, then as farce, an acute social analyst wrote. Trump’s presidency was one long tragedy recapitulating McCarthyism. Trump’s post- presidency has been mostly farce, featuring such insane ideas as assassinating Fauci.

Farce can turn into tragedy quickly in this climate, however. The least the U.S. government must do for Fauci in recognition of his long and valuable service to the nation is to protect him with the same intensity it protects the president.