>Badge of Honor

>Spend that ammo ds

>Reveal yourselves ds

'With his poll numbers sagging in a campaign season circumscribed by the coronavirus, it’s easy to forget how intoxicating Donald Trump’s political rise was to certain people. In 2015 and 2016, Trump broke many of the unwritten rules about where and how a candidate campaigns, and what a candidate can say and do. Normal candidates and the bulk of the media, even the conservative media, treated his campaign as a joke every step of the way.

As he continued to rise, he exposed the weakness of the norms that had built up around American presidential campaigns over decades. He proved that you could succeed while insulting the media and all the recent nominees and presidents of the party you were running to lead, attacking veterans and the war-wounded, and questioning a federal judge’s decision based on his ethnicity. He proved that you didn’t need a stump speech that had been worked on by 30 consultants; you could just riff and test slogans and catchphrases live on CNN. He defied the laws of political physics and paid no price for it. Depending on if you were a supporter or an opponent, he inspired excitement or dread that anything might happen next.

It’s no wonder than that Trump consistently attracted coalitions of people who felt excluded by the political status quo. Some of those people were just oddballs and cranks. Some of them were extremists or haters. They produced elaborate theories about why Trump’s movement was larger than one man, why it was a hinge moment in history. For those driven mad by America’s foreign policy and spying, Trump was an implacable foe of “the blob” and the Deep State. For people looking for a sign from heaven, Trump was a potential new Constantine. For others he was an escape from hundreds of years of misbegotten liberal theories of politics. For racists, he was a harbinger of white-identitarianism on the march worth a Sieg Heil or two.

These were the esoteric cases for Trumpism, and they’ve run aground on the beach of Trump’s actual presidency.

As he approaches the end of his first and maybe only term, Trump has changed very little about America’s foreign policy. He’s shifted some troops and materiel from NATO and domestic attitudes toward China have grown more hawkish on his watch. But the latter development was mostly a result of Chinese malfeasance and may have happened without him.

…'

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-sad-cult-of-esoteric-trumpism/

'Dr. Harvey Risch, a noted Yale epidemiologist, has accused White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci of waging a "misinformation campaign" against the drug hydroxychloroquine, claiming the medication has shown consistently encouraging results in treating COVID-19 when used properly.

Hydroxychloroquine has been at the center of a protracted political debate since March, when President Trump cited the drug as a promising possible treatment for the novel coronavirus. HCQ has long been used by doctors to treat malaria along with other syndromes such as arthritis and lupus. The World Health Organization lists it as an essential medicine, while nearly five million Americans hold prescriptions for it.

Since Trump's speculative endorsement of the drug, media outlets and medical officials have for several months aggressively promoted various medical trials that have determined the drug has no effectiveness in fighting COVID-19; many commentators have also insisted, in spite of the drug's decades-long safe track record, that it is too dangerous to be used to cure the disease.

Among the drug's critics has been Fauci. In March, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases dismissed claims of HCQ's effectiveness as "anecdotal" and has periodically voiced that skepticism over the course of the pandemic.

On Tuesday during an interview on "Good Morning America," Fauci further downplayed the drug's purported benefit, claiming that "the overwhelming prevailing clinical trials that have looked at the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine have indicated that it is not effective in [treating] coronavirus disease."

Drug is 'the key to defeating COVID-19,' says infectious disease expert

Risch, however, is sharply criticizing Fauci's approach to evaluating the drug's effectiveness, arguing that repeated trials and tests have shown that it is markedly effective at treating COVID-19 so long as it is administered properly.

…'

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/yale-epidemiologist-accuses-fauci-running-disinformation-campaign