By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
I would like to extend and amplify one little bit
of Michael’s excellent post this morning and say this:
Anthony Fauci should stop complaining about the obscene phone calls and the
death threats.
Unhappily, this sort of thing now is part of the ordinary
daily business of anybody who is in public life — and Fauci is a practically inescapable
public figure. But his nemesis in this matter, Senator Rand Paul, gets the same
thing. (Senator Paul has in fact been physically assaulted.) But even
considerably less well-known figures endure a more or less regular barrage of
threats, obscenity, and the like. I do. People on cable-news shows do. People
who are big on social media do. And though I am not much of a feminist, I would
suggest to anybody who wants a genuinely horrifying account of this sort of
thing to ask virtually any woman in public life about it.
But to do what Fauci is doing — to treat the ravings and
rhetorical misdeeds of the lunatics as though they discredited ordinary
political disagreement — is dishonest; worse, it encourages the very thing that
Fauci complains about by elevating and amplifying it. We should treat it like
what it is: the almost always inconsequential ravings of people who are fixated
on some public figure or public controversy but whose rage and psychic
incontinence more often are rooted in personal inadequacies and unrelated
anxieties — people who started off shaking with rage and then looked around
until they could find something or someone to hitch it to. People who need to
physically protect themselves should do so, of course, but cynically exploiting
the outpourings of mentally incompetent people on Twitter or down in the
comments section amounts to very little more than petty political
advantage-seeking.
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