Opinion
By Jeff Childers
02-02-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Already. In your roundup: the inevitable backlash against unwarranted credentialism has arrived and is building; news from Trump’s DC criminal case deflates democrats; and Florida walks the walk with Texas on the border.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥 Having been proved right times one thousand, I take no joy; I feel only that familiar kind of annoyed satisfaction tinged with parental concern, the way you feel when a small child is told not to play with the fire wand — twice! — and then suddenly flames off his little eyebrows.
I told them so. A wild, uncontrollable tornado of backlash has now been unleashed, and the smug so-called experts are all sitting blithely in its path, like idiots, daydreaming and plucking at daisies, not realizing they’re about to be snatched up, badly shaken, and rudely deposited under somebody’s house in Kansas with their trousers irreverently hauled up in knots around their lying little necks.
Treasonous Archfiend of Pseudoscience and unkempt celebrity grifter Peter Hotez recognizes the danger. Maybe not the full scope of the danger. But Hotez wrote a horrible, self-pitying book last year (that nobody is reading) side-splittingly titled, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning.” Okay, Peter. Whatever.
Hotez’s authorial tour (or more likely his P.R. team) prompted the publication of some truly horrible fake-news propaganda, like this ludicrous headline from the corrupt Canadian Broadcast Company back last September:
(Wait. A pediatrician? Are you kidding me? My first gobsmacked thought was, who in their right mind would leave their children with Peter Hotez? I’d bet my next three paychecks that disheveled doctor doesn’t see any kiddies as patients at all, that’s just another in a long series of lies. But I digress.)
And, “a scientist’s warning?” Please. Give me a break. That’s all they’ve been doing for the last four years, warning us about a million fake crises that never materialized. If only Peter and his cronies had listened to a lawyer’s warning. From mid-2020 I was telling them as often as I could that, while they could ram their unwanted public health ‘science’ down our throats as pandemic mandates and emergency edicts, eventually there would be a reckoning.
Welp. Their reckoning cruise ship has sailed up to the dock and is now ready for boarding. Time to go.
Hotez was partly right about one thing. There’s an ‘anti-‘ movement afoot, all right, but it’s not anti-science. It’s anti-expert. And since they themselves broadened the definition of “expert” to include just about anyone with a post-graduate degree or university job, the target zone is, as they say, rich.
You will recall, I’m sure, last month’s humiliating self-owns by Harvard President Claudia Gay and Penn State president Liz Magill. One way of thinking about what happened is the diverse academics were mauled by an unforeseeable pro-Israel zeitgeist that popped out of nowhere like a career-killing Jack-in-the-Box. Or, maybe they were exposed as woefully underqualified DEI hires, fuzzy-minded hypocrites, and overpaid flim-flam artists.
But there’s no escaping the fact that, before the pandemic Gay and Magill would have gotten away Scott-free with their arrogant refusals to give straight answers to the questions from dull, non-PhD-having Congresspeople. Instead, they pranced prettily into the propeller blades because credentialed experts have no trust residual to draw on anymore. Nobody likes them. Nobody trusts them. They were wrong about everything.
In other words, everyone is fed up with academic experts who think they are better than everybody else just because the media fawned over their every word during the pandemic. They are now experiencing a rude awakening.
🔥 I can offer no more recent evidence of the tsunami of reckoning washing away the edifice of fake expertise than yesterday’s Harvard Crimson story headlined, “Top Harvard Medical School Neuroscientist Accused of Research Misconduct.” It’s bad. A Harvard darling, a so-called expert and top medical science research professor, now stands credibly accused of having falsified (Portlanders: that means made up) his data and having plagiarized other people’s images and illustrations, in over 20 of his papers during a twenty-year period. Over once a year on average.
Meet prolific plagiarist “Doctor” Khalid Shah. If that’s his real name:
The Crimson story suggests the doctor may have taken a few shortcuts, you know, to make sure his papers popped and so that he would get the “right” answer.
Who knows how much the alleged cheating contributed to Shah’s meteoric career? While other academics toiled away, following the rules, not obtaining the astounding pro-pharma results like the not-so-brilliant Dr. Shah did? Real science is a lot harder.
Shah’s deceit was discovered by data manipulation expert Elisabeth M. Bik. Ms. Bik is every woke academician’s worst nightmare. She is a “real” expert with a talent and a passion for sniffing out academic fakesters. Nowadays Elisabeth uses A.I. and reverse image searching to help, but she’s written guides explaining how you too can help expose fraudulent Harvard doctors. According to Liz’s bio, her exposé work has resulted in 1,069 Retractions, 149 Expressions of Concern, and 1,008 Corrections (as of last November).
If you’re a science type, here’s a link to Elisabeth’s blog post on her investigation of Dr. Shah’s ‘work,’ if you can call it that.
For everybody else, according to the Crimson, Bik found 44 different examples of made-up data in Dr. Shah’s papers between 2001 and 2023. But the “most damning” problems were from Shah’s 2022 paper in Nature Communications (it had 32 other authors, but Shah was the lead author). Bik said Shah’s 2022 paper contained figures and images stolen from seven other papers (written by other scientists) plus some images copied straight off the websites of two scientific product vendors.
For instance, one of Shah’s pinched pictures came from an online catalog by R&D Systems, which makes scientific research antibodies. Shah did not give credit to R&D Systems for using its image in his 2022 article. Instead, Dr. Shah claimed the image was from his own work and — get this — he edited the picture’s labels to show a completely different antibody than the original.
Totally fake. Fake, fake, fake fake fake.
“This is a really unusual sort of thing that I cannot imagine how this happens by accident,” drily noted an independent professor who reviewed Bik’s findings for the Crimson.
Harvard again! What is obvious beyond denial is the bigger movement afoot: the anti-expert movement. Ms. Bik’s helpful labors are but one small special forces unit in the army of discontent that Peter Hotez can see coming through his smudgy, pie-shaped eyeglasses. Mark my words. Their downfall will be so complete that before this is over, they’ll be claiming they were set up.
🔥 Yesterday brought a little more good legal news for President Trump. The Post-Millennial ran its story yesterday about one of the pending Trump cases headlined “BREAKING: Trump J6 case REMOVED from DC court docket.”
I know. It’s devilishly hard to keep track of all these different lawsuits and prosecutions. It seems like they multiply faster than rabbits. I’d love to assign each one some kind of shorthand nickname for easy reference, but that would just baffle new readers. So each time, at peril of boring regular C&C readers, I have no choice but to remind everyone which case we’re talking about so nobody gets left behind.
Banana Republican and Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, pictured above, is trying his best to lock up President Trump in two different federal criminal prosecutions, one in South Florida and another completely separate one in DC. Today’s update relates to the DC case, which The Washington Post says is for “charges of plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.”
Uh huh. Overturning the results by throwing a rally miles from the Capitol. Okay.
Anyway, the back story is that Trump moved to dismiss this case, since at the time of the alleged plotting, Trump was President and enjoyed presidential immunity. Presidents need immunity, or else every bloated Fani Willis in the country would be constantly filing charges against them and harassing them to distraction.
Judge Chutkan promptly swept aside two centuries of Presidential precedent and ruled nope, no presidential immunity. Trump’s lawyers just as promptly appealed. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals is currently considering the case, and has stayed the trial pending its decision. Once the DC Circuit’s three-judge panel rules, Trump can then appeal to the full DC Circuit, and after that he can appeal to the Supreme Court.
It’ll take months and months. A trial this year is a distant memory.
But Judge Chutkan was holding on to Trump’s summer trial date like an old man holding on to his counter ticket at the deli. But yesterday, the judge apparently gave up her hopes of keeping a 2024 trial and canceled it without setting a new date.
Generally speaking, any defendant who’s not in hoosgow greatly prefers not having a trial date. This is even more true in Trump’s case, since democrats want too see Trump in the slammer before the elections, and they need trials to do it. The removal of Trump’s case from Judge Chutkan’s docket means it ain’t gonna happen before November.
While it might seem like a little scheduling thing, you really have to see the depressing effect it had on democrat partisans. After the news, social media libs seemed hopeless, adrift, and were trying to comfort each other, like a group of Gazan survivors wandering through the rubble or something. For instance, this lawyer — assuming his Twitter bio is real — specializes in “complex litigation,” and told despairing democrats not to worry, that Judge Chutkan can just reschedule Trump’s trial whenever she wants:
Um, no. That’s an awful take; it’s just wrong. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he bathroom tweeted without really thinking it through. The appellate process must finish before Judge Chutkan can re-schedule the trial.
The “prospect of a fast trial” is over.
🔥 That was fast! It only took one day; I guess that’s how things are going in 2024. After pledging real border support to Texas only two days ago, yesterday Governor DeSantis followed through and delivered. Florida’s local Alachua Chronicle wrote a nice article republishing the Governor’s announcement headlined, “More border support: Governor Ron DeSantis sends additional Florida National Guard and Florida State Guard to assist Texas.”
CLIP: Governor DeSantis offers battalion of National Guard to Texas (1:08).
Yesterday’s press release from the Governor’s office announced the deployment of an entire battalion of Florida National Guard to the Texas border, assuming Texas accepts, along with the deployment of the new Florida State Guard to help with checkpoints and humanitarian needs:
Today, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that Florida is deploying members of the Florida National Guard (FLNG) and members of the Florida State Guard to assist Texas in its efforts to stop the invasion at the southern border. Florida is offering up to a battalion of National Guard members (approximately 1,000 soldiers) to Texas, who will be deployed based on Texas’ needs.
Well, this was walking the walk. While twenty-five states have pledged to “support” Texas, so far Florida is the only state to offer this kind of significant human resources. Florida stands with Texas.
Have a fantastic Friday! Coffee & Covid is -inside the borders- so you don’t need to invade anybody to come back in the morning for a terrific, Peter Hotez-sized Weekend Edition. See you then.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
