Confessions of error are rare enough in woke America that they should be strictly construed against the speaker. Two such confessions — the legal term is “admissions against interest” — suddenly appeared last week.
The first confession came
in an Oct. 20 letter
from Principal Deputy Director of the National Institutes of Health Lawrence Tabak. He admitted that a “limited experiment” conducted under an NIH grant but not reported on time was “testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
This appears to have been, as Rutgers University biologist
Richard Ebright argued
, “gain-of-function research,” creating viruses more contagious to humans. If so, it directly contradicts assertions by NIH’s Anthony Fauci and Director Francis Collins that the NIH was not funding such research. Strictly construed, the confession means that Fauci and Collins lied or attempted to mislead.
It also means that something here is rotten, and not in the state of Denmark. Peter Daszak, the head of the NIH grantee in question, EcoHealth Alliance, was also the man
who last year organized
a
letter to the British medical journal
Lancet
dismissing as ridiculous the theory that the COVID-19 virus was disseminated from a leak in the labor in Wuhan.
That led to Facebook’s suppression for months of the lab leak hypothesis, which now seems the most likely explanation for the virus’s spread.
If you want an example of how scientific, governmental, and tech elites conspired to suppress information embarrassing to themselves and to China, there you have it.
The second apology came on Oct. 22
from the National School Boards Association
for its Sept. 29 letter to President Joe Biden charging that parents protesting school board decisions should be investigated for “domestic terrorism.”
It turns out that the NSBA
had discussed the letter with White House staffers
before sending it. Three business days after its release, Attorney General Merrick Garland called on the FBI and U.S. attorneys to investigate disruptions and threats at school board meetings.
The inspiration for the September letter had been protests at school board meetings in Loudoun County, Virginia, just west of Washington. One parent, whose daughter had been raped by a “gender fluid” boy in a school bathroom, was violently hauled out of the meeting at which Superintendent Scott Ziegler assured the audience, “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms. … the predator transgender person simply does not exist.”
Ziegler was lying, and, in fact, that male student wearing a dress
was just convicted of the rape in juvenile court on Monday
. What’s more, Ziegler knew he was lying. It turned out that he had emailed school board members on May 28 stating that a female student — the protesting parent’s daughter — had been sexually assaulted in a girl’s bathroom by a male student wearing a dress.
This male student has also been charged with and still faces trial for another sexual assault on Oct. 6, which took place in the school to which he was quietly transferred after committing that first assault. On Oct. 15, Ziegler (
salary: $295,000 a year
) apologized for his June 22 statement and his board’s failure for years to report assaults as required by state law.
Ziegler and his board seemed guided by the notion that they have superior expertise and enlightenment to the angry parents. On June 22, he had cited a 2016 Time article and a 2019 Journal of Pediatrics report as evidence for what by then was his knowingly false claim that “
the predator transgender student simply does not exist
.”
The notion of superior expertise was also evident in the Sept. 29 televised debate in which Democrat Terry McAuliffe, seeking a second nonconsecutive term as governor, said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” It was also inherent, as his Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin pointed out, in his 2014 veto of a bill that would have informed parents of sexually explicit material in school libraries.
McAuliffe, with his characteristic slapdash regard for truth, said Youngkin favored banning books and said a Youngkin ad was a “racist dog whistle.” Biden, in an event in Arlington just 3.7 miles from the White House, chimed in to the same effect.
Youngkin’s position that “parents should be in charge of their kids’ educaton” seems more popular, however. Despite the state’s Democratic tilt, four polls have shown the race tied, and one survey showed parents of school-age children favored Youngkin 56% to 39%.
Confession is supposedly good for the soul. But the NIH and NSBA confessions are also good for illuminating how and why ordinary people are increasingly skeptical of the motives and probity of the elites who feel entitled to rule over them.
