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NR PLUS Forgotten Fact Checks

Correcting Fauci’s Revisionist History on School Closures

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Dr. Anthony Fauci attends a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., September 14, 2022. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

Over the weekend, Fauci claimed to have had ‘nothing to do’ with ensuring that American kids spent months at home.

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Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we fact-check Dr. Fauci, count the costs of championing Ye, and hit more media misses. 

Fauci Backtracks

Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared on ABC over the weekend to plead “not guilty” to having contributed to the extended closure of K–12 schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Fauci, he had “nothing to do” with ensuring that American kids spent months at home, suffering irreversible learning loss while their counterparts in Europe returned to the classroom without incident.

Unfortunately for Fauci, there’s a long trail of clips and quotes to convict him of not just the original offense but perjury as well.

Of course, no one could blame Fauci for, in March 2020, recommending school closures as a mitigation strategy; little was known about the virus at that time, so precautions had to be taken. But then in the summer of 2020, after the evidence showed that children were largely safe from the virus, Fauci said that, while there should be a general attempt to reopen schools that fall, he had misgivings.

“However, and I underline however, having said that [schools should open], what is paramount is the safety and the welfare of the children and their teachers,” said Fauci, before submitting that they should open only if you have “a very, very low level of infection.”

By December, Fauci had more unambiguously embraced the cause of those who wanted schools open, arguing in an interview that localities should “close the bars and keep the schools open.”

And yet, Fauci again reversed himself in February 2021 so that he could help the Biden administration push its $1.9 trillion spending bill, saying that schools required “more resources” to open. He doubled down on that the next month, demurring that “it’s just not that easy — open or shut,” and again took positions that aligned with calls for the spending bill.

Moreover, Fauci contributed to closures not just by his rhetoric directly relating to schools, but by spending his considerable airtime on television making people feel more fearful of the virus and doubtful of mitigation strategies. As late as July 2021, Fauci was still suggesting that fully vaccinated Americans should wear masks. 

With the country’s most prominent doctor so unsure of the vaccines’ benefits, it’s no wonder that teachers’ unions were able to parlay his missteps into more remote work.

Fauci has become a symbol for many of all that was wrong with the public-policy response to the pandemic. That’s not just because of his mistakes, but because of his refusal to admit and learn from them.

Yikes, Ye

Introducing his honored guest on October 6, Tucker Carlson declared that the detractors of Ye — formerly known as Kanye West — called him “mentally ill” and “too crazy to take seriously” because they opposed his “ideas.”

That just might be because his ideas are worth opposing. 

Since his interview with Carlson — during which the rapper declared that he thought that former president Donald Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was motivated to work in the Trump White House “to make money” and that the Kushner family more generally is “about . . . making money” — Ye has gone on to make his thoughts much more explicit. 

On October 7, he shared a screenshot of a conversation with rapper Sean Combs in which he told Combs “Ima use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me.”

“I told you this was war,” he continued.

On October 8, Ye tweeted, “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death [sic] con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE. The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also. You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”

Then in a podcast interview on Saturday, Ye commented on intimate reports about his ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s life by arguing that “it’s Jewish Zionists that is about that life, that is telling this Christian woman that has four black children to put that out as a message in the media.”

“We Jew so I can’t be antisemite,” he once again reassured his interlocutors, echoing a theory popularized by the Black Israelite hate group.

Carlson certainly isn’t responsible for every word that comes out of the musician’s mouth. But he is responsible for lending credence to Ye’s deranged theories by insisting, as he did in his monologue, that Ye is not just sane but someone worth listening to. “We’ve rarely heard a man speak so honestly and so movingly about what he believes,” announced the most-watched host on cable news. 

It is common knowledge that Ye was once committed to the UCLA Medical Center because of struggles with hallucinations and paranoia, and that he has at various points admitted to suffering from suicidal ideation and bipolar disorder. He’s also professed to having had an opioid addiction.

Worse still, according to a report from Vice, much of the content that didn’t make it off the cutting-room floor of the Carlson interview should have suggested to the host that Ye’s views were not those of the right-headed — if overeager — advocate that Carlson presented him as.

In the edited-out portions, Ye mentions that he’d “prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa — at least it will come with some financial engineering”; and he speculates that “professional actors” were “placed into my house to sexualize my kids.” He also submitted that foul play had been involved in the death of a black fashion designer who had died of cancer.

It’s no crime for journalists to interview controversial or bigoted subjects. In fact, much of the best journalism involves letting such figures speak for themselves. But to tout someone with such heinous things to say as a thoughtful commentator is both irresponsible and disrespectful of your audience, even if the interview subject uses the right — and even compelling —  talking points on other important issues.

Headline Fail of the Week

In case you hadn’t heard, “America is facing a diaper crisis and the anti-abortion movement is making it worse,” or so argues Sandra Salathe at Yahoo Finance.

The piece does nothing to prove that pro-lifers are preventing less fortunate Americans from purchasing diapers — in fact, it admits that just one organization provided 1.2 million packs in 2019 alone to needy families — and instead complains that the nonprofits use some of their funds for overhead costs. It’s unclear how an editor signed off on that headline — and of course Salathe is a senior editor there.

Media Misses:

• The New York Times showed its bias clear as day with this tweet about the Wisconsin Senate debate: 

• As independent journalist Jesse Singal ably demonstrated, John Oliver made reckless and false claims about the safety of puberty blockers in adolescents on a recent episode of his program Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: 

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