Dakota Beacon

Now that it appears that President Trump is out of office, some of the cockroaches are coming out of the corners and talking to the press.  Last weekend Dr. Deborah Birx, known to most of us as the “Scarf Lady”, revealed to CBS’s Face the Nation, the shocking news that Trump was getting information beyond that which she supplied to him!  How dare he?  

The image of a deeply disturbed woman emerges from the comments and complaints she made.  This woman seems to have thought that no information should have been allowed to reach the President of the United States save by her approval.  She says she became aware of suspicious “parallel data'' reaching his hands in spite of her efforts to guard the door.  The arrogance is truly astonishing.   Here we were - an entire population faced with an unknown disease that was weaponized against us - biological warfare from communist China - and instead of the White House becoming a clearinghouse for everything we could find out about this dread, mysterious disease, we have little Dr. Deborah Birx in her sensible shoes and paisley scarves, trying to stand guard and prevent the President from acquiring illicit information not approved and allowed by her.  

This is, of course, an outrageous attitude for any supposed “scientist” to take.  Scientific knowledge comes from various sources.  We should be considering all possible sources of information.  That is what science is .  What it is not is picking and choosing the information that fits the narrative you have already decided upon.  

Trump has earned a lot of praise for some of the constructive things he did accomplish during his four-year term.  His supporters tend to give him a pass on the virus policies because we really had no way of knowing, and neither did he, what the nature of this bug was.  But it is hard to forgive his adherence to these phony “scientists” and “doctors” - people who took it upon themselves to become policy makers and petty dictators to the rest of us.  Their power was truly immense.  Their prognostications served to shut down our nation’s economy for nearly a year and counting.  Fauci has been the target of a lot of resentment, but Birx deserves her share  

Can we even imagine what would have happened to our efforts in World War II had FDR received only briefings from or approved by one source?  Many more thousands of lives would surely have been lost.  It is no different with this.  We are now learning as more information is coming out despite the media’s attempts at censorship, that many have died needlessly and that our businesses have been destroyed without reason.  Trump did apparently allow some information to seep in past his “Covid team”.  The question that remains for many of us is why he had this team to begin with?  Well, sure, it was a sort of PR stunt - the public needed some kind of placebo - assurance that the government was “doing something”.  The unreasoning fear was palpable.  Perhaps Trump should have channeled FDR’s Fireside Chats and his admonishment that our only fear was “fear itself”.  That, in the long run, might have gotten us by much better. 

Maybe we should be less demanding of our federal government to provide answers.  As it worked out we had both too much federal talk and not enough federal action.  Trump was willing to pander to the fear factor with his briefings with Birx and Fauci all summer - they provided a show just about every day, trotting out their messages of doom.  On the other hand, he was willing to leave all of the real policy decisions up to governors and mayors.  Some of us felt he was not fulfilling his responsibility to ensure that a governor or mayor was not trampling our Constitutional rights as American citizens.  SInce when has it been acceptable for a state’s governor to override the U.S. Constitution?  Under the 14th and the 9th Amendments, they do not have the right to deny our rights.  Surely the right to operate a legal business or go to work at a legal job are among our natural rights.  Just as with the failure to step in to put down riots, Trump allowed our economy to tank.  It was nothing short of a miracle that the GDP did not sink, but this does not change the fact that the American people were severely damaged by this response.  There is a case to be made that Trump could have better defined the actual powers of governors.  NY Governor Cuomo managed to kill thousands of people through his Covid policies.  Chicago’s Mayor LIghrfoot, Michigan’s Governor Whitmer and numerous others throughout the nation have destroyed many people’s lives and ridden roughshod over our rights as American citizens under our Constitution, with the tacit consent of the President.

So, we not only saw Trump censored by the media, mainstream and social, but we had people on the public payroll - Birx was receiving in excess of $305,000yhear and Fauci approximately $418,000 from taxpayers for their “services”.  Why were they even there?  We are getting used to the mindless belief that Trump had a great and complex plan all along and everything bad that has happened was for a “reason”.  Even now we keep hearing this from the Trump supporters.  “Let Biden and his team do their worst.  Let the people see how bad it will get.  Let him kill thousands of jobs.  Let him turn felons loose on us.  Let him turn our power grid over to the Chinese communist government.  Let him stop guarding the border.  Let the migrants flood in.  The people will find out how bad Biden is.”  Yeah, right.  But what will be left of us when Trump and company finally think that the other 25% of the voters got it?  They tell us, and I really believe it is true, that about 68% to 75% of the voters voted for Trump.  So how much do we really care whether that other 25% to 32% really think while we are suffering?  It would seem to many of us that we are paying a very high price just to win over the hard-core that voted for Biden.  They probably can never be convinced that liberty and free enterprise are better than communism anyway.  

The old adage about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer is beginning to wear a little thin in Trump’s case.  I’m sure he knew better than to believe wholly in whatever these over-paid “experts”, Birx and Fauci, told him.  Apparently he was aware that they were trying to filter out vital information from him so he could make informed policy decisions.  And yet, despite his awareness of their malevolence, their arrogance and their extreme fallibility, he still allowed the American people to be subjected to their influence.  Then he wondered how the press and the opposition and finally the people, could have things so upside-down.  Some might come to the conclusion that he overplayed the idea of teaching us all a lesson.  It is not reasonable - we relied on information presented by him in his press conferences, the experts he chose.  No defense was offered us against governors and their horrible responses to the virus situation.  We were left mostly defenseless and with lies.  

Now Birx, disgraced when she broke all of her own draconian rules and visited her family on the holidays, even as she said the rest of us and our needs were expendable, surfaces again to rail against Trump for managing to dodge her door guards and actually admit information she did not review and approve.  

Maybe a whole new course should be required for doctors and other people involved in science - humility and awareness of their own imperfection and their own sense of absolute knowledge and infallible judgment.  And maybe we should rethink the idea that a president should maintain the strict delineation between federal and state power if he is going to present “experts” on the federal stage.  There is no question that America was blindsided (perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised) by a biological attack from our enemy, China.  It is unreasonable to expect that a president could have all of the information and knowledge of the virus used to attack us.  But it was an error to set up these obviously incompetent and compromised “experts” at our expense to dictate senseless policy to us.  

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