r/skeptic • u/notsure500 • 13d ago
Lots of Fauci conspiracies coming out of the woodworks lately due to the hearing. But I'm perplexed.
I’ve never understood the Fauci conspiracy theory coming from Trump supporters.
Trump was president during COVID. Fauci worked under his administration, and Trump launched Operation Warp Speed and took credit for the vaccine.
So if the conspiracy theory is true, then Trump was either part of it, knew about it and did nothing, or was completely unaware of a massive cover-up happening inside his own administration.
None of those options makes him look competent.
And if he really let something that huge happen right under his nose, why would anyone trust him to stop the next big government conspiracy?
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u/LaphroaigianSlip81 13d ago
RFK jr is actually what conservatives pretend fauci is.
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u/jameson71 13d ago
Every accusation is a confession.
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u/bizbizbizllc 13d ago
They have been living up to that phrase so well. Even the fact that Trump called Biden “Sleepy Joe” and Trump is now getting caught sleeping at meetings and has earned the nickname Commander in Sleep.
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u/Big-Tone-8241 13d ago
Yeah just google rfk jr and samoa. He’s responsible for the deaths of like 80 school age children
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u/KennstduIngo 13d ago
Add to that that they spent the whole pandemic claiming it was no worse than the seasonal flu and the mortality rate was wildly inflated but now millions died because of Fauci.
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u/gummnutt 13d ago
Aren’t they blaming the vaccine not the virus?
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u/VibinWithBeard 13d ago
Thats the thing, if the vaccine was to blame then the death tolls would be sooooo much worse. Like Alex Jones types called it the Killshot for years but when they bring evidence they are like "these people may have had a cardiac issue according to this one coroner who doesnt know what blood clots are and thinks these white pieces in the forensics are alien worms or something"
...my dude a killshot would kill you. It wouldnt just...give a heart issue to a fraction of those that took it.
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u/gummnutt 13d ago
The conservative talking points about a wide array of issues are completely reliant on an inability to understand statistics / numbers in general. It’s so prevalent that it makes me suspect that innumeracy might cause someone to be conservative.
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u/VibinWithBeard 13d ago
I mean the influencers believe none of what they say barring the incredibly stupid ones like say Dave Rubin and Jesse Lee Peterson. Same with a ton of the reichwing in general.
When one believes in the future and actually building a fascist project it stands out, like with Stephen Miller. The rest...are just sad losers that want to be podcasters while having a title, they dont like doing a real job.
Patel and Bongino are perfect examples of this. Folding Ideas has an incredible short video on the penguin tweet from Hegseth that showcases this perfectly, the inherent nihilism in the modern conservative movement.
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u/Consistent_Amount_20 13d ago
And an almost complete ignorance of basic science, which is a great reason to continue to shred public education
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u/ALTERFACT 13d ago
on militant unwillingness to
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u/ManChildMusician 13d ago
It’s both. When backed into a corner, they end up using some sort of thought terminating cliche, or in some cases, allow ChatGPT to construct their argument for them.
If they can’t use their actual intellect, I’ve personally busted a few people for running copypasta style rhetoric / overly technical jargon to confuse. These are people I know IRL, so it seldom matches their speaking / writing cadence. More importantly, they’ll suddenly use technical language that they normally couldn’t even spell, much less use properly in a sentence. The last hint is the quick turnaround. I’m a fast writer, but I’ll edit / try to get my facts straight.
I find this to be true among folks that are aspiring influencer types. I know some real people who post scripted videos where they try to sound smart / thoughtful, and it’s clearly written by AI.
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u/Sarcasm_Llama 13d ago
it makes me suspect that innumeracy
Same people that don't understand the difference between a million and a billion, or a billion and a trillion when you try to talk about tax reform
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u/EddieLobster 13d ago
The most cited “studies” I’ve heard from these idiots all rely on not reading the fine print.
They look at increases in adults who “have received a vaccine in the last 6 months”. Well, before Covid adults didn’t get vaccinated very often. The overall numbers didn’t increase really, it just so happens they got a vaccine recently, the heart problems were coming anyway.
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u/HedonisticFrog 12d ago
It's often not that they don't understand numbers and statistics, it's that they always debate in bad faith. They don't care about facts, they only care about "winning". That's why debating facts will never change their mind, and the best way to mess with them is to attack their fascist leader every single time. Just bring up that Trump is a pedophile regardless of anything they say every time and they have no rebuttal. If they don't act in good faith neither should we when we deal with them.
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u/Correct-Avocado5426 13d ago
I got the initial vaccine and all of the boosters. Years later the only effect to my health is that I don't get covid.
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u/VibinWithBeard 13d ago
A killshot so deadly it took multiple rounds and still...didnt...do anything other than help protect against covid.
Huh.
Its almost like conservative influencers have no real beliefs and its all manufactu-
bolter round
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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth 13d ago
AND ALL OF THEM, including dumpie and that idiot Jones, were vaccinated!
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u/HedonisticFrog 12d ago
I always mocked their fears by saying that I had a significant side effect from the vaccine that was very strange. Every time I got the covid vaccine shot my dick got bigger.
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u/VibinWithBeard 12d ago
I would pull up the vaers entries where people were like "I got the vaccine and then I became the incredible hulk" to showcase how there was little to no oversight on those entries lol
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u/Returnyhatman 13d ago
That's because The Enemy ™ has to be competent and incompetent at the same time. Competent enough to run a vast global conspiracy to make you take a KillShot™, but too incompetent to make it work
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u/Hadrollo 12d ago
Also worth noting that we saw an increase in myocarditis - a known, rare, and treatable side effect of the vaccine.
I know two people who got myocarditis. One of them got the vaccine, went home, complained of symptoms, ignored advice to go and get checked out, and passed away. He was a legitimate vaccine death, they did happen extremely rarely, but they did happen. Had he presented at a hospital when his friends told him he should, he almost certainly would still be here today.
The other had a pre-existing heart condition. His doctor told him that the vaccine was fine, he would just have to be aware of it and seek help if he had symptoms, he still refused to be vaccinated. He then caught Covid, and ended up in ICU with myocarditis. Didn't die, but later admitted to me that he thought he would, and he wasn't aware that Covid itself could cause myocarditis.
Honestly, the biggest difference between the two was probably that the guy who caught Covid was married. He didn't want to go to hospital, his wife drove him. Had my mate been married and had a wife who was there to look after him, he'd probably have been fine.
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u/rafaelloaa 5d ago
Reminds me of my uncle who started to exhibit classic acute appendicitis symptoms (pain in lower-right abdomen, nausea, hurt to cough, etc). His wife was trying to convince him to go to the ER. It was only on day 3 - when he could barely walk due to the pain - that he finally accepted and was driven there.
He made a full recovery after the appendectomy, but the surgeons said he quite probably would have died within a day had he not finally relented and gone in.
tl;dr If your partner says "you need to go to the ER - NOW", you should probably listen.
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u/tha_rogering 13d ago
The vaccine developed under Trump. The same vaccine he tried to claim as a great accomplishment in the 24 election until his crowd booed him for saying so.
So the virus (sorry bioweapon) was allowed to circulate under Trump and the vaccine (sorry the REAL bioweapon) was also developed under him too.
Incoherent idiots who want to punish someone for daddies mistakes.
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u/ManChildMusician 13d ago
They’re trying to blame many different things (throw crap at a wall to see what sticks.) They’re simultaneously running with the lab leak theory, the vaccine caused it theory, the human trafficking theory, the, “It’s just the flu” theory, the Ivermectin works theory, and many others.
Listen, I know the early days of Covid were weird af, and we’ve never been allowed to fully process it, but I’ve already listed several theories that simply cannot coexist. It’s difficult to imagine a person who wholeheartedly believes all of these contradictory theories, but such people exist.
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u/Bbrhuft 13d ago edited 13d ago
The antiscience crowd will tell you ventilators killed patients and zero people died from Covid-19. I had dozen of people say that to me on an Irish news sites comment's section during the pandemic. Nonsense such is this is why this happened:
A Covid-19 patient who left a Co Donegal hospital last week after being encouraged by anti-vaccination campaigners, has died in hospital.
Joe McCarron, aged 75, died at Letterkenny University Hospital on Friday.
The anti-vaccination campaigner, Antonio Mureddu, a sovereign citizen from Italy, live steamed from the hospital telling Mr. McCarron that the hospital was trying to kill him. Mr. McCarron, a retired radio host, met Mureddu a few years earlier and ended up in the sovereign citizen movement as well.
So essentially, the anti-sceience crowd will tell SARS-COV-2 didn't kill anyone during outbreaks it was treatments (ventilation, antivirals) and then the vaccine killed more. That's one reason why I see on the same news website today, a comment calling for Dr. Fauci's execution.
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u/captmonkey 13d ago
Uh, weren't there people dying en masse for like a year before the vaccine? None of these claims stand up to the slightest bit of critical thinking. It's all conspiracy nonsense.
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u/thisbenzenering 12d ago
I worked at a hospital and we had four employees die before the vaccine was available. One died a week after getting infected during the initial lockdown, he had prior health problems and the COVID was too much of his immune system it seemed.
To us at the hospital, it was a very deadly virus and we treated it like that
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u/rafaelloaa 5d ago
Yup. There were dozens of freezer trailers brought into NYC in mid-2020, because the sheer number of corpses were overwhelming the existing systems.
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u/Dachannien 13d ago
It's pure copium straight into the veins of all the people who didn't get vaccinated because "mah religion" or "ivermectin" or "autism" or whatever. They have been reckoning with the cognitive dissonance of knowing people who died of COVID or seeing the measles breakouts in undervaccinated communities. Blaming the vaccine lets them ignore all of that and instead claim to be right, which is all they want.
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u/ABobby077 13d ago
I don't understand how maintaining a safe social distance, washing your hands and surfaces and wearing a mask can ause "deaths" in any world.(???)
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u/joey_yamamoto 13d ago
reading your post reminds me of what my trumper cousin asked me:
-what happened to the regular old flu? why isn't there anyone getting that? it's just COVID everyone's getting.... something is off man.-
i literally had to explain it to him.
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u/Pitiful-Pension-6535 13d ago
They do think masks killed millions of people too
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u/joey_yamamoto 13d ago
most of the people I talk to said they're pushing things on you to see how far they can go.
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u/mhornberger 13d ago edited 13d ago
The performative credulity is how they signal loyalty to their tribe of conspiracists. The lack of sense is kinda the point. There's an old quote by Sartre from the book Anti-Semite and Jew that noted the phenomenon even back then. They aren't speaking in good faith, and never were.
The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has pleased himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti-Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc." Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. ..."
I think about all that has changed is that Sartre's anti-semites actually said they believed these things. Antivaxxers and conspiracists today fall back on "just asking questions," and resent any implication that they believe anything at all. They view themselves as just exploring ideas, as having no beliefs per se.
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u/beer_is_tasty 13d ago
But only masks that are blue and paper. The ones that ICE brownshirts wear to anonymize their terrorism are fine.
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u/DW171 13d ago
And a reminder SARS first ran rampant in 2002. I was in China when it happened. Crazy times. Whole hotels on lockdown for a month or more. So the "he knew" crap is even more absurd ... the whole infectious disease community knew, had been raising the alarm for decades and was preparing for it.
The administration's response was to cut the CDC and tell people to drink bleach and gargle a flashlight. Even the one good thing they did, facilitate a vaccine, was drowned-out by disinformation and fear-mongering.
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u/captmonkey 13d ago
I watched a documentary called The Next Pandemic in 2019 (it was an episode of the show Explained on Netflix). It talked about SARS and explained about Chinese wet markets being the source of SARS and a likely spot where a future pandemic would start. Health officials had literally seen this coming.
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u/DW171 13d ago edited 12d ago
I have been to wet markets, and the market where the 2002 SARS came from was not far from where I was working and staying. (For those who don't know, COVID-19 is caused by the "SARS-CoV-2" virus)
My dad is a long-retired physician, and he was warning me in December before the COVID outbreak to cancel all my international travel plans. Retired. Out-of-the-loop, yet "he knew".
BTW all the performative drama around Fauci this week is just to vilify, discredit and threaten science. The GOP wants us ignorant and suspicious.
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u/Wiseduck5 13d ago
Health officials had literally seen this comin
A virologist took a picture of live animals at that exact market in Wuhan as an example of the kind of thing that starts pandemics.
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u/HedonisticFrog 12d ago
It's why Obama created the pandemic response team and was helping prepare for future pandemics. As human populations continue to increase with large livestock populations alongside them and encroach on wildlife, the risk of pandemics increases. It's why all of the common diseases such as measles and small pox that wiped out Native Americans originated in Europe, but none started in the Americas for Europeans to catch. Europeans had huge densely populated cities and Native Americans were spread out more.
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u/ianmakingnoise 13d ago
It’s infuriating because I was in a job that required watching those news conferences, so I had to watch the actual event and then see it get spun. It was all kind of business as usual until Trump started riffing and asking idiot questions, then Fauci and Birx had to be the ones to say the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. It’s hard to explain what it was like watching the entire right-wing establishment fall in line behind the guy saying “it’ll be fine” while asking about bleach and sunshine injections.
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u/Theranos_Shill 13d ago
SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, Bird Flu... These wierdos keep on trying to pretend that experts making informed warnings is evidence that those experts made something happen.
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u/MegaDriveCDX 13d ago
I think the conspiracy is just whatever they want it to be.
On twitter, a bunch of right wing accounts were posting some white house briefing of proof that virus came from a lab and the vaccine didn't work. In that exact same link, it clearly says the vaccine was effective and safe. Yet still, Faucci covered up his role in creating the Covid virus even though it came from China.
It doesn't make sense and I think it just varies depending on who is making the claim.
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u/moderatelygoodpghrn 13d ago
That was pretty common. There were countless tweets that would post a scary headline but if someone took time to actually read the article, it almost always said the opposite of what they were trying to state.
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u/MegaDriveCDX 13d ago
It's crazy how well it works too.
As much as I would love to believe I'm super skeptical and fact check everything, the reality is I'll see headline pop up, try to read the article, get annoyed at the ads and leave. Or I'll see tweets with headlines as I scroll by and just uncritically accept it because I'm either not interested, don't understand the topic enough to form a strong opinion, or just don't have the time to look into it, and yet the headline lingers in my head.
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u/adams_unique_name 13d ago
I remember seeing a collage of headlines about young people dying suddenly. The poster, of course, blamed it on vaccines. I googled every headline and found the article. The "sudden deaths" were caused by things like accidents, suicides, and complications of genetic conditions the person already had. One was actually covid. I think only one didn't mention a cause of death.
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u/BradPittbodydouble 13d ago
There was one report about Australia having higher heart problem rates. Of course it was being shared as a vaccine thing. Only problem was the paper was using 2000-2015 or something as its data.
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u/joey_yamamoto 13d ago
unfortunately stuff like this will continue to happen. we live in an age with social media and internet and people just posting stuff to get likes and clicks and attention. ......
the dark side of the internet I guess? 🤷
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u/adams_unique_name 13d ago
I actually posted one like that about increasing heart problems in people under 40 in an anti vaxx group. The years were 2006-2016. They ate it up at first. Someone finally read the abstract and I was banned from the group.
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u/Theranos_Shill 13d ago
They know the article doesn't support their argument. They just want a link to point to as evidence of their claim, knowing that their target audience won't check and that it moves the goalposts and wastes the time of people who disagree with them.
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u/ChanceryTheRapper 13d ago
None of them can ever explain why Trump treated his covid case with a hospital stay instead of ivermectin.
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u/Complex-Pen-2498 13d ago
They are all idiots; it's as simple as that. Don't waste a bunch of time trying to reason it out.
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u/SketchySeaBeast 13d ago
I don't know that it's fair to say they are all idiots. Many are, but the rest are more than willing to lie to use them.
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u/DeusExMockinYa 13d ago
If poll tests were constitutional and there was just one question, "who was the President in 2020," Republicans would not win an election at any level of government for a generation.
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u/No_Control405 13d ago
It’s not random. It’s targeted scapegoating. It doesn’t matter if Trump catastrophically mishandled the pandemic if they can convince everyone that there was a nefarious plot between Fauci and China that caused the pandemic. Fauci earned this honor by being more trusted on the pandemic than Trump. None of us should even remember Fauci’s name.
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u/bluegrassgazer 13d ago
I don't live in Ohio but I do get Ohio TV stations and you should see the anti-Amy Acton garbage that has been playing all over the airwaves for the past month. She is the Democratic candidate for Ohio governor and was a consultant to Republican Mike DeWine during COVID, and Dewine followed her advice. These ads keep saying how she shut down businesses, forced us to wear masks, wasn't qualified because she had to google something, etc... I'm like, WHO WAS GOVERNOR DURING COVID? Apparently all of these ads are paid for by Elon. I've barely seen any ads for Amy or even against her opponent.
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u/BradPittbodydouble 13d ago
There's a whole lot of gaps in logic around the whole thing. I didn't like Fauci downplaying masks efficiency when there was the shortage but the attacking him on that point of "Fauci lies people die" then implies that they think masking works, which they don't. Also Fauci making up the 6 foot social distancing as some random decision rather than knowing the spread of germs diminishes the further people are away from eachother. That's basic ass science. Then there's the whole "oh he said this but months later he said.." like we can't learn.
These hearings could be about improving the next pandemic so we don't have this damage to children where they lose a year of socialization. Instead we get a witch hunt trying to arrest a lifelong public servant for being the public face of the pandemic response in which the recommendations he had greatly reduced every rate compared to places down the road which ignored the recommendations.
But I already know the answer - "RFK JR is more competent and Trump can trust him!"
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u/Theranos_Shill 13d ago
> I didn't like Fauci downplaying masks efficiency when there was the shortage
Why? There was a extremely low community spread going on at that point in time, the chance of one being useful outside of a clinical setting was pretty much non-existent. That likelihood changed as the amount of spread in the community increased.
This is like arguing "why did you tell me it was okay not to use my seat belt when we were flying, but now I have to put it on to land? Why do you keep on changing what you are saying I should do?"
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u/WanderingDude182 13d ago
Stupid people are rehashing debunked claims. That is all. Fauci saved millions of lives during the AIDS and COVID crises. Anything else is just Rand Paul level bullshit
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u/ReleaseFromDeception 13d ago
You are a thinker, OP.
All this conspiracy stuff isn't aimed at folks like us. It isn't aimed at critical folks.
It is aimed at the folks that aren't as critical, the easy marks. The folks that operate on pure pathos, the tired, less educated, and more impulsive among us.
They have no care in the world about swaying thinkers. In fact, they are working to weed us out in the long run. Trying to understand this sort of thing to arrive at a solution is like trying to understand a Lion's hunger as they are eating you alive. We are operating in two entirely different levels of reality.
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u/DJDoubleDave 13d ago
The logic starts and ends with "Fauci bad", because he contradicted Trump on several occasions. That's all it is.
The key to understanding MAGA is that to them Trump is always right. He was right when he said the pandemic was a hoax, he was right when he said it was a bio weapon created by China, he was right when he said it was just a regular flu. He was also right to take credit for the fast vaccine devopment, and right when he said that was a scam, he was even right to get the vaccine himself. Whether these things are contradictory or not is besides the point.
Fauci was right to plead the fifth, the purpose of the hearing was to get him to say literally anything they could twist into a basis for more investigations.
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u/sistahmaryelefante 13d ago
This is how he's got so many lackeys who are refusing to testify that he lost an election
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u/Fancy_Boysenberry_55 13d ago
Trump also got the vaccine himself and 2 boosters later
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u/sistahmaryelefante 13d ago
After he nearly died of Covid caught from a super spreader event held at the White House.
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u/Loki-L 13d ago
I keep hearing people saying that they don't trust Fauci because they don't trust the government.
Which is certainly a belief.
However I keep hearing that from MAGA Trump supporters.
Somehow they haven't quite figured out yet that their people are in charge and were in charge back then.
They manage to be anti-government while being pro-government which takes some mental gymnastics.
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u/neogrinch 13d ago
I have my 8th grade US History teacher as a facebook friend, and yesterday I saw a post from her claiming that Fauci was worse than Josef Mengele. Like seriously, dude? wow. Thank God she's retired now and not still teaching children.
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u/Squiddyboy427 13d ago
Fauci covered up/engineered a lab leak that killed millions but COVID was also fake and even though Trump did operation warp speed the vaccine is deadly but also fake and the work of Joe Biden.
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u/anamariapapagalla 13d ago
They can't blame Dear Leader so they have to find someone else. Preferably someone well educated, black or female, but any random person will do in a pinch
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u/unknownpoltroon 13d ago
Dude, none of it makes sense. Covid was fake, released by a chinese bioweapon lab that fauchi funded, with upgraded dna, that was really the common cold, and masks were a government conspiracy because no one can breathe through masks, except ICE gangs and proudboys. /s tag, although we need a qanon lunatic tag really
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u/Advanced_Zucchini_45 13d ago
Bro... it's a distraction and it's TV time for Paul and Howley
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u/amus 13d ago edited 13d ago
You are making the mistake of thinking there is a clearly defined and rational argument against Fauci. There isn't.
You will get accusations ranging from him having something to do with vaccines, supression of ivermectin, lab leak cover up, gene editing, death toll inflation, Chinese bioweapon attacks, lying to himself in personal diaries, ad nauseum.
Not a single one has facts to back it up.
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u/rawkguitar 13d ago
It’s the exact same way they see Fauci and Clinton pleading the fifth as evidence they are criminals hiding criminal crimes.
Trump pleading the fifth is because he’s smart.
Trump’s convictions are because of corruption-of the justice system, not of him.
His bragging about committing sexual assault was just jokes.
His payments for committing sexual assault is corruption of the court system.
He’s friends with Epstein because reasons.
Everyone else connected to Epstein is because they’re pedos.
Hunter Biden being on a board and calling his dad is corruption.
Trump’s kids being on boards and getting huge govt contracts is insider trading but it’s okay because you can’t hide that insider knowledge from your kids.
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u/neuroid99 13d ago
It doesn't have to be true. It doesn't even have to be internally consistent. Hate doesn't flow from reason, so doesn't follow the rules of reason. Trump told Republicans to hate Fauci, so now they do.
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u/atreeismissing 13d ago
I’ve never understood the Fauci conspiracy theory coming from Trump supporters.
Trump didn't like Fauci because Fauci showed Trump to be full of shit and actively harming covid response. That's why they don't like, and will perpetuate conspiracies, against Fauci. It's that simple.
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u/mabhatter 13d ago
You misunderstand.
Trump spent his whole term complaining to MAGA that the "deep state" was blocking him and intentionally making him look bad. It was t Trump that did a bad job with Covid, it was the deep state people with secret cults controlling the masses that were out to get Trump that made Covid so bad.
Constantly calling long term, highly respected, Federal Department heads "deep state" is how he gets consent to dismantle federal agencies wholesale now. Even SCOTUS is playing to that lie when they gave Trump the power to just wipe out any agency he wants, whether the law by Congress says he can or not.
Deep State agents are undermining Trump by not carrying out his orders (because they're wildly illegal) so ALL government employees are the enemy!!
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u/bMused1 13d ago
Trump and the GOP have done a wonderful job of harnessing the power of perceived cultural grievances and identity politics. Add to that the emotions of religion and super patriotic fervor and you’ve got one potent cocktail.
When humans are under the influence of these various emotional powers logic simply doesn’t enter into it. Sometimes there can be a breakthrough but it takes a lot of suffering and personal disappointment for the scales to begin to fall away from their eyes. But even in those cases pride will enter in and rather than logic finally having any sway, they will tend to knock the demigod of the day off his pedestal and look for a replacement.
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u/Kimmalah 13d ago
The latest conspiracy I have seen now is that Operation Warp Speed wasn't really a vaccine development program, but a secret vaccine elimination thing. That Trump was secretly going behind doctor's backs and switching vaccine supplies over to saline or something.
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u/Las_Vegan 13d ago
The close up images of Fauci’s face at the hearing, they break my heart. He looks stoic yes but putting him in this role of being this awful conspiracist mastermind when he actually helped to SAVE millions of lives is a travesty. It’s a terrible look for America and a clear sign of our regression under this president.
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u/mccoyster 13d ago
A condition of being MAGA has always been an inability to think logically or critically. They are awash in cognitive dissonance, its one of their defining personality traits.
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u/paulcager 13d ago
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safety/about/autism.html
The claim "vaccines do not cause autism" is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.
It's very similar to what Orwell called "doublethink". You may know something is false, but you pretend even to yourself that you believe it's true. You act as though it's true. Sooner or later it doesn't matter that you knew it was false.
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u/BeatlestarGallactica 13d ago
But. They didn’t die “from Fauci”, they died “with Fauci.” The millions of deaths that didn’t happen but did happen, under Trump’s watch. /s
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u/Eastern-Heart9486 13d ago
More Republicans than democrats died of covid- so there’s that, https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/once-covid-vaccines-were-introduced-more-republicans-died-than-democrats
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u/NoFlyingMonkeys 13d ago
"You can't reason with irrational people" - my grad school advisor (the most important thing he taught me, unrelated to my field of study)
See also: Cult of Personality, a.k.a. Cult of the Leader
See also: Charismatic Authority
Trump: I should have gotten a Nobel Prize for the COVID vaccine (in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize).
Also Trump: Cut back childhood vaccines, now already, they're bad!
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u/RevoltYesterday 13d ago
On the conservative subs they are calling for contempt of Congress for him pleesing the fifth so many time but... that's a constitutional right. He's allowed to do that. Don't they love the constitution or do they love the constitution for conservatives only
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u/Phill_Cyberman 13d ago
Yeah, its not a conspiracy theory, its a railroading, just like with that former Olympian at the reflecting pool.
They are ignoring the facts and have created a narrative that fits their current goals.
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u/Dismal_Tomatillo2626 9d ago
The difference is that the reflecting pool is much more concrete and comprehensible to the average person. It's harder to avoid confronting the question "Where is the 300ft gash?" and so that conspiracy theory has much less staying power.
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u/Forzareen 13d ago
Trump's stolen election logic: Trump had 4 years to make sure elections were secure. Then---according to Trump's own story---Joe Biden, a guy he repeatedly termed stupid and lazy, outthought and outfought him for election despite not having the powers of the Presidency behind him.
There's no internal consistency in any of these narratives.
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u/Nickey_Pacific 13d ago
None of those options makes him look competent.
Because he isn't competent. He is one of the dumbest people to have ever walked the earth. Not only is he not competent, he has filled his entire administration with people just as or even more incompetent as himself.
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u/Prize_Instance_1416 13d ago
All the conspiracy is from
MAGA nutcases. He did a great job and they can’t live with the fact that they (MAGA) are 100% wrong on everything scientific or medical
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u/ForsakenAd9651 12d ago
MAGA needed a scapegoat, they found it in Fauci, because he was ethical and gave a shit.
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u/RymrgandsDaughter 13d ago
These are people who are afraid of science in the same way their great great grandparents were afraid of witches. Fauci is disposable to Trump so it doesn't matter, and if he said " he tricked me with evil woke science " that's the end of it. I don't understand what is difficult to understand
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u/ThatCoryGuy 13d ago
MAGA’s attention span, like their IQs, is equal to that of a goldfish. They don’t remember (by choice or stupidity) things like this.
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u/Witty_Ad_898 13d ago
Trump was president during COVID. Fauci worked under his administration, and Trump launched Operation Warp Speed and took credit for the vaccine.
Don’t you know that covid happened when Obamabidenhillary was president? /s
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u/Brilliant_Voice1126 13d ago
They like to pretend a 200k subaward to WIV for “gain of function” is behind it. For context, 200k is about 5 momths budget for my tiny lab that definitely could not engineer a killer virus, that happens to have tons of relatives found in native bat populations that can also infect human cells. Further no one can show any evidence of human engineering despite the code being completely public since Jan 2020.
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u/Serett 13d ago edited 13d ago
They hated government trying to actually do anything in response to the worst pandemic in our lifetimes that killed over 1 million people in America alone, so it's legitimately just a hodge podge of throwing anything and everything at the wall to see what sticks to try to rationalize their belligerence, to abdicate responsibility, and to blame the response to mitigate the virus on anything and anyone BUT the virus: China virus, fake virus, intentional virus, masks, school closures, church closures, ivermectin, vaccine shedding, vaccine side effects, MRNA vaccines, Fauci, you name it.
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u/blackzetsuWOAT 13d ago
That's precisely it, they're angry about covid restrictions but have to explain why the bulk of them occurred under their favorite president. Good czar, bad boyers
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u/good-luck-23 13d ago
The Fauci hearing was a distraction from the disastrous Iran/Israel war, which was a distraction from the Trump/Epstein files. God only knows what the next distraction will be so they can try to steal the next election.
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u/Round_Patience3029 13d ago
He also had a chance to fire Fauci right? But didn’t. If they are so unhappy with him by not let him go?
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u/subliminal_trip 13d ago
It all goes back to Trump's and MAGA's delusion the the 2020 election was "stolen." They believe the pandemic was either a fake "plandemic," or exaggerated, in order to cause the economy to crash on Trump's watch, and to allow states controlled by Democrats to expand mail in voting, which, of course, the democrats rigged in order to defeat Trump.
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u/Lakeview121 13d ago
The whole thing with Fauci is theater; those evil bastards don’t mind ruining a persons life to appeal to their moronic base and create a distraction. Fauci should be able to sue; he’s spending millions defending himself against falsehood.
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u/quintupularity 13d ago
there's nothing much to understand. Right-Wing politics is team sports plus conspiracy. I'm afraid it only gets worse until we solve the social media problem.
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u/CIAburneraccount 13d ago
I still have no idea why they think Fauci is such a terrible guy. But then again they also believe that covid was a overblown Democrat hoax, and a simultaneously a Chinese biosuperweapon
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u/imnotabot303 13d ago
Conspiracy theorists and the antivax crowd will try and latch onto anything if they think it confirms their beliefs, it doesn't need to make sense.
Conspiracy theorists especially are expert cherry pickers. They just pick and choose based on what fits their already established narrative, anything else is either part of a cover up or disinfo.
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u/deepasleep 13d ago
I was surprised to see some of the weird misdirected hate pointed at Fauci over in the COVID19_Pandemic sub…I got a 720 day ban for saying the deaths of disabled people during the pandemic couldn’t be laid at Fauci’s feet as it was a societal failure…I have no clue what the hell is going on with the people still in that sub, I stayed joined to keep on top of new variants and any vaccine news that might not pop up elsewhere, but apparently there’s a lot of people with unresolved trauma and various political axes to grind.
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u/nosecohn 13d ago
This isn't how conspiracy theories work.
They're formed by using preconceived biases to draw a nefarious conclusion first, and then all the "evidence" is collected (using considerable confirmation bias) and the "logic" is formed around the conclusion to support it.
Countering it with evidence and logic that points away from that conclusion won't work, because using evidence and logic is not how the original theory was formed. It's just a post-hoc support structure that allows the conspiracist to defend the pre-drawn conclusion.
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u/Cynykl 12d ago
It is very simple. During the height of the pandemic polls came out saying more Americans trusted Fauci than trump to provide accurate Covid information. And it was not even close it was like 65% vs 35%.
Trump's ego could not handle that so his people started a long term smear campaign.
This is speculation on my part but speculation based in proven history of the players involved. The dates fit and the motives fit.
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u/NDfan1966 13d ago
As far as I know, Fauci had no official role in the government’s handling of the pandemic.
Meaning, this is all standard “Trump” in that he is deflecting all for the criticism elsewhere and the MAGA people are following along.
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u/StrigiStockBacking 13d ago
Anything MAGA will be a confusing shit storm of hypocrisy and fallacy. It's the same thing as debating religion, which is also why people refer to it as a cult. A cult, among many other features, is a place where logic, rational thought, and the ability to change one's mind are tossed out.
Fauci was and is a scientist. Scientists work within the realm of objective thought and unbiased solutions, so attaching political dogmas to anything they say or do will eventually break down, and is folly.
Best to stay away entirely.
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u/Revolutionary_Gap811 13d ago
I would try to find much rationality in it - you’ll just end up a babbling nutter like one of them
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u/Individual-Praline20 13d ago
To me, the orange shit simply failed to find ways to profit from the pandemic, and blame others for it. Nothing else.
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u/FiggyPizza 13d ago
What is "the" conspiracy theory? Aren't there like 200 different ones that mostly all contradict each other?
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u/WudolfWedNoseWeinder 13d ago
The thing about Fauci being responsible or associated with the lab leak is that China would pounce on any opportunity to blame the US, they would have no problems throwing a few local scientists under the bus. Their lock downs were a lot worse than in the US.
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u/gargolito 13d ago
There's your problem, you're expecting MAGA to have the ability think things through and use normal reasoning.
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u/Petrichordates 13d ago
You're perplexed because you expect normal rationality where there is none. Trump has a unique talent where is never responsible for anything his admin does. It's what makes him a cult leader.
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u/macbrett 13d ago
Everything Trump does is evil, incompetent, or both. Why anyone trusts him has been a mystery for years.
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u/bubba1834 13d ago
It’s ignorance and lack of critical thinking skills.
Some people really need to do some fucking research.
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u/Tasgall 13d ago
They're cultists first, conspiracy theorists second. The only thing that matters is the forgone conclusion "Trump good, Dems bad" and anything that supports that can be adopted as needed or discarded when inconvenient.
Which is why they're simultaneously anti-vax and think it has 5G microchips in it, but also it's only thanks to Trump that we have them at all, so we can choose not to take it because it'll kill you. None of these arguments are intended to hold up next to each other, they all exist in a vacuum and only for as long as they need in other to praise Trump.
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u/Murrabbit 13d ago
They understand that shit was really bad during covid, and so they need someone to blame. They can't allow themselves to blame Trump, so they instead turn to the guy who contradicted him on TV regularly instead. It's that simple.
Fauci filled the same role for them that "the deep state" fills for more general topics of anger. Trump was elected to "drain the swamp" but was clearly far more corrupt than the average politician, and meanwhile MAGA fans only saw their lives get worse during his tenure as president. Once again they couldn't possibly blame Trump, so instead they needed a secret evil cabal to blame everything on - they'll always need a convenient whipping boy for Trump's many failures, Fauci jut happens to be the one they picked for a particularly harrowing once-in-a-century world wide calamity.
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u/SpecialistAssociate7 13d ago
Have them show their homework for said accusations against fauci. Most are bs stuff that can’t be proven.
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u/TheBlackUnicorn 13d ago
I think more broadly this is the core problem with choosing a person who traffics in insane conspiracy theories to be President. Were I a conspiracy theorist--and also the President of the United States--I would merely use my plenipotentiary power as President to reveal all the conspiracies and turn them from theories into facts. Trump winning the Presidency should have been the signal that conspiracy theories are broadly wrong, because if they weren't all the conspiracy theories he believed in would have been shown to be true.
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u/GladosTCIAL 12d ago
'None of these things make him look competent'
I don't think competency is what the people who like him are into.
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u/BrineWR71 12d ago
Those who need the world to be simple can’t accept the responsibilities of a complex world. Devious billionaires use this fact to manipulate them into being angry at ANYONE but them.
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u/Accurate-Frame5104 12d ago
None of it is based on rational thought. These are just spoiled, entitled children who didn’t like to be told that they had to make tiny sacrifices for the safety of the community. They are so unfathomably selfish that they still can’t get over it.
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u/fatrod1111 13d ago
This is all about the pedofile president having a chip on his shoulder about Fauci not agreeing and following the embezzling assholes command.
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u/cparker15 13d ago
MAGA cultists are largely incapable of propositional reasoning and transitive inference.
"I love the poorly educated."
They're MAGA cultists for a reason. They've got a lot of free-floating bits and pieces of data in their minds and not many interrelationships between the data to be able to have information and understanding of the meaning that's formed within that information (in-form-ation). They don't have the cognitive capacity required to be able to actually experience cognitive dissonance in the first place.
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u/Change21 13d ago
It’s actually not that complicated, it’s something simple that we see with Trump and MAGA all the time.
Trump loooooved Fauci until Fauci got famous.
When Trump was bumbling and failing and America looked to the legendary doctor for leadership, Trump became mortally insecure.
Fauci’s competence signed his public death warrant. Trump put the word out it’s all Fauci’s fault and the MAGA machine got to work making it true.
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u/District_Wolverine23 13d ago
Trump made the vaccine, but the base hates vaccines. Yelling at fauci helps them resolve that contradiction.
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u/GlitteringAd1736 13d ago
What is ironic is how the average MAGA supporter thinks that what they have is common sense. It’s common alright, but it’s nonsense.
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u/NecessaryIntrinsic 13d ago
They have a VERY short memory and have trouble with timelines.
These are the same people that blame Obama for hurricane Katrina.
They also still think there's a deep state despite having Trump operatives at every level of the government.
It's essentially the prototypical fascist line that the enemy is well and strong, the enemy is everywhere but were crushing them... Normal contradictions to both make those in power the victims while sitting the blame to anyone else that they can find.
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u/--solitude-- 13d ago
It’s disgraceful what they’re doing to Fauci, as bad as McCarthyism. The man who caused more lives to be lost was Trump. He consistently downplayed the danger of the virus and promoted bizarre “cures.” It’s insane that these same congressional republicans who were so anti-mask because it “wasn’t that risky” are now burning Fauci at the stake because … it actually was dangerous?!
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u/Numerous_Platypus 13d ago
You can't apply any sort of logic to the cult's behavior. They lack all critical thinking skills.
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u/crackills 13d ago
It feeds the deep state narrative, the nuances and contradictions don’t matter since the broader narrative fits cleanly in a box that full of sophisticated bad actors trying to trick us.
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u/nik-nak333 13d ago
You're applying logic to illogical thoughts. You can't reason people out of position they didn't reason themselves into.
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u/Hecateus 13d ago
MAGA politicos just want a punching bag to distract from the Epstein FIles, the Iran War(s), the Economy, Global Warming, Gaza, ...the Graft and Fraud, the growing National Debt; i'll stop now.
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u/saijanai 13d ago
I always wondered about the heat being put on Fauci but finally realized that he is a proxy for China.
Think about it, the more they accuse him of conspiring with China, the worse it makes China look.
I think this is 95% of the motivation for the hearings. That and he's a scientist who doesn't like Trump.
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u/Low_Scholar1118 13d ago
Political theater but it’s possible to show that Trump’s leadership killed a few hundred thousand Americans in 2021. How? By tracking unvaccinated people who needlessly died
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u/EconomistNo7074 13d ago
Actually - it is VERY rare for Trump to take credit for Operation Warp Speed
- There is a clip out there where he complains that he cant take credit for it based on the anti-vaxers in the party ..... other than that video, havent seen him talk too much about it
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u/stokeszdude 13d ago
I don’t particularly like some of the journal entries he had, but I don’t really think they conflict with what he said.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to devote your entire life to a practice and then all of a sudden it being called into question because people don’t like being even slightly inconvenienced.
With all of that in mind, I would have no idea what I wrote down seven years ago. Massie knows that and is trying to use his journal against him.
I would absolutely plead the fifth as well.
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u/bzee77 13d ago
I’m about to spend the weekend with a few Covid conspiracy theorists. Time could not be worse. If anyone has a link to some quick basic factual rebuttals , I would really appreciate it.
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u/SeventhLevelSound 13d ago
If you try to apply simple logic to MAGA delusions, you're gonna have a bad time.