Mediaboss Marketing

For half a year, Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-disease official, and Kentucky senator and physician Rand Paul have been locked in a battle over whether the National Institutes of Health funded dangerous "gain of function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and whether that research could have played a role in the pandemic. Against Senator Paul's aggressive questioning over three separate hearings, Dr. Fauci adamantly denied the charge. "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology," he said in their first fracas on May 11, a position he has steadfastly maintained.

Recently, however, a tranche of documents surfaced that complicate Dr. Fauci's denials. The documents, obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests, show that the NIH was funding research at the Wuhan lab that involved manipulating coronaviruses in ways that could have made them more transmissible and deadly to humanswork that arguably fits the definition of gain-of-function. The documents establish that top NIH officials were concerned that the work may have crossed a line the U.S. government had drawn against funding such risky research. The funding came from the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Dr. Fauci heads.

The resistance among Dr. Fauci and other NIH officials to be forthcoming with information that could inform the debate over the origins of COVID-19 illustrates the old Watergate-era saw that the coverup is often worse than the crime. There's no evidence that the experiments in question had any direct bearing on the pandemic. In the past, Dr. Fauci has made strong arguments for why this type of research, albeit risky, was necessary to prevent future pandemics, and he could have done so again. But the NIH has dragged its feet over FOIA requests on the matter, handing over documents only after The Intercept took the agency to court.

The apparent eagerness to conceal the documents has only raised suspicions about the controversial research and put the NIH on the defensive. Fauci told ABC, "neither I nor Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, lied or misled about what we've done." The episode is a self-inflicted wound that has further eroded trust in the nation's public health officials at a time when that trust is most important.

While Dr. Fauci takes the political heat, the revelations center on another figure in this drama: Peter Daszak, president of the private research firm EcoHealth Alliance, which received the $3 million NIH grant for coronavirus research and subcontracted the gain-of-function experiments to the Wuhan lab. The activities of Daszak and EcoHealth before the pandemic and during it show a startling lack of transparency about their work with coronaviruses and raise questions about what more there may be to learn.

From the start, Daszak has worked vigorously to discredit any notion that the pandemic could have been the result of a lab accident. When the media was first grappling with the basics of the situation, Daszak organized a letter in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet from 27 scientists, to "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," and got himself appointed to the WHO team investigating COVID origins, where he successfully argued that there was no need to look into the WIV's archives.

What Daszak didn't reveal at the time was that the WIV had been using the NIH grant money to genetically engineer dozens of novel coronaviruses discovered in bat samples, and that he knew it was entirely possible that one of those samples had contained SARS-CoV-2 and had infected a researcher, as he conceded to the journal Science in a November 17 interview: "Of course it's possiblethings have happened in the past."

The NIH fought for more than a year to keep details about the EcoHealth grant under wraps. The 528 pages of proposals, conditions, emails, and progress reports revealed that EcoHealth had funded experiments at the WIV that were considerably riskier than the ones previously disclosed.

The trouble began in May 2016, when EcoHealth informed the NIH that it wanted to conduct a series of new experiments during the third year of its five-year grant. One proposed producing "chimeras" made from one SARS-like virus and the spike proteins (which the virus uses to infiltrate animal cells) of others, and testing them in "humanized" mice, which had been genetically engineered to have human-like receptors in their lungs, making them better stand-ins for people. When such novel viruses are created, there is always a risk they will turn out to be dangerous pathogens in their own right.

Another risky experiment involved the MERS virus. Although MERS is lethalit kills 35 percent of those who catch itit's not highly transmissible, which is partly why it has claimed fewer than 900 lives so far. EcoHealth wanted to graft the spikes of other related coronaviruses onto MERS to see how that changed its abilities.

Both experiments seemed to cross the gain-of-function line. NIH program officers said as much, sending Daszak a letter asking him to explain why he thought they didn't.

In his reply, Daszak argued that because the new spikes being added to the chimeras were more distantly related to SARS and MERS than their original spikes, he didn't anticipate any enhanced pathogenicity or infectiousness. That was a key distinction that arguably made them exempt from the NIH's prohibition on gain-of-function experiments. But, of course, one never knows; as a precaution, he offered that if any of the chimeric viruses began to grow 10 times better than the natural viruses, which would suggest enhanced fitness, EcoHealth would immediately stop all experiments, inform the NIH program officers, and together they'd figure out what to do next.

The NIH accepted Daszak's terms, inserting his suggestions into the grant conditions. Scientists at WIV conducted the experiments in 2018. To their surprise, the SARS-like chimeras quickly grew 10,000 times better than the natural virus, flourishing in the lab's humanized mice and making them sicker than the original. They had the hallmarks of very dangerous pathogens.

WIV and EcoHealth did not stop the experiment as required. Nor did they let the NIH know what was going on. The results were buried in figure 35 of EcoHealth's year-four progress report, delivered in April 2018.

Did the NIH call Peter Daszak in to explain himself? It did not. There are no signs in the released documents that the NIH even noticed the alarming results. In fact, NIH signaled its enthusiasm for the project by granting EcoHealth a $7.5 million, five-year renewal in 2019. (The Trump administration suspended the grant in 2020, when EcoHealth's relationship with the WIV came under scrutiny.)

In a letter to Congress on October 20, the NIH's Principal Deputy Director, Lawrence Tabak, acknowledged the screwup, but he placed the blame on EcoHealth's door, citing its duty to immediately report the enhanced growth that had occurred: "EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant." In a follow-up interview with the Washington Post, NIH Director Francis Collins was more blunt: "They messed up here. There's going to be some consequences for EcoHealth." So far, the NIH has not elaborated on what those consequences might be.

As damning as the NIH grant documents are, they pale in comparison to another EcoHealth grant proposal leaked to the online investigative group DRASTIC in September. In that 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon research arm, EcoHealth sketched an elaborate plan to discover what it would take to turn a garden-variety coronavirus into a pandemic pathogen. They proposed widely sampling Chinese bats in search of new SARS-related viruses, grafting the spike proteins from those viruses onto other viruses they had in the lab to create a suite of chimeras, then, through genetic engineering, introducing mutations into those chimeras and testing them in humanized mice.

One piece of the proposal was especially Strangelovian. For years, scientists had known that adding a special type of "cleavage site" to the spike could supercharge a virus's transmissibility. Although many viruses in nature have such sites, neither SARS nor any of its cousins do. EcoHealth proposed incorporating human-optimized cleavage sites into the SARS-like viruses it discovered and testing their infectiousness. Such a cleavage site, of course, is exactly what makes SARS-CoV-2 wildly more infectious than its kin. That detail was the reason some scientists initially suspected SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered in a lab. And while there's no proof that EcoHealth or the WIV ever actively experimented with cleavage sitesEcoHealth says that "the research was never conducted"the proposal makes it clear that they were considering taking that step as early as 2018.

DARPA rejected the proposal, listing among its shortcomings the failures to address the risks of gain-of-function research and the lack of discussion of ethical, legal, and social issues. It was a levelheaded assessment. What's remarkable is that much of the same work that crossed a line for the Department of Defense was embraced by the National Institutes of Health.

The NIH and EcoHealth have asserted that none of the engineered viruses created with the NIH grant could have become SARS-CoV-2. On that, everyone agreesthe viruses are too distantly related. But the detailed recipe in the DARPA application is a blueprint for doing just that with a more closely related virus.

In September, scientists from France's Pasteur Institute announced the discovery of just such a virusSARS-CoV-2's closest known relativein a bat cave in Laos. Although still too distant from SARS-CoV-2 to have been the direct progenitor, and lacking the all-important cleavage site, it was a kissing cousin.

The discovery was hailed by some scientists as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 must have had a natural origin. But the plot turned in November, when another trove of NIH documentsreleased in response to a FOIA request by the White Coat Waste Projectbrought the evidence trail right to EcoHealth's doorstep.

In 2017, EcoHealth had informed the NIH that it would be shifting its focus to Laos and other countries in Southeast Asia, where the wildlife trade was more active, relying on local partner organizations to do the sample collecting and to send the samples to the WIV for their ongoing work. EcoHealth told Newsweek that it did not directly undertake or fund any of the sampling in Laos. "Any samples or results from Laos are based on WIV's work, funded through other mechanisms," says a company spokesman.

Regardless of who paid for the collecting portion of the project, it's clear that for years, a large number of bat samples from the region that harbors viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 were sent to the WIV. In other words, EcoHealth's team was in the right place at the right time to have found things very close to SARS-CoV-2 and to have sent them to Wuhan. Because there's a lag of several years between when samples are collected and when experiments involving those viruses are published, the most recent papers from EcoHealth and the WIV date to 2015. The identity of the viruses found between 2016 and 2019 are known only to the two organizations, neither of which has been willing to share that information with the world.

A lack of evidence proves nothing, but neither does it put EcoHealth's or the WIV's actions in the early days of the pandemic in a good light. Why choose not to share valuable information on SARS-like coronaviruses with the world? Why not explain your projects and proposals and give scientists access to the unpublished virus sequences in your databases?

For whatever reason, they chose crisis-management mode instead. The WIV went into lockdown. Databases were taken offline. Daszak launched his preemptive campaign to prevent anyone from looking behind the curtain. And EcoHealth and the NIH tried hard to keep the details of their collaboration private.

Congressional inquiries focusing on Dr. Fauci and the NIH's decisions to fund unnecessarily risky research by a lab in Wuhan are probably forthcoming if, as appears increasingly likely, Republicans take control of Congress after the 2022 midterms. While it's important to understand how the NIH came to use such poor judgment in its dealings with EcoHealth Alliance, that won't tell us much about the WIV's research in the months leading up to the pandemic, especially since China is not likely to open its books. Answers are more likely to lie in the records of EcoHealth Alliance. Republicans and Democrats alike should be eager to find them.

Original post:
How Dr. Fauci and Other Officials Withheld Information on China's Coronavirus Experiments - Newsweek

A bipartisan group of 84 House members will send a letter to President Joe Biden on Wednesday requesting that the administration push for the inclusion of $1 billion in supplemental funding for Israels Iron Dome missile-defense system in an upcoming government spending bill, Jewish Insider has learned.

The House passed the Iron Dome funding as a standalone item in September, but it remains stalled in the Senate, where Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is blocking a fast-tracked approval process.

The House members 76 Democrats and eight Republicans led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) will urge Biden in their letter, a draft of which was obtained by JI, to specifically request that Congress include supplemental funding for Israels Iron Dome in an appropriations bill enacted before the years end including in any anomalies you may request to a new continuing resolution.

Government funding is currently set to run out on Dec. 3 just days after Congress returns from its Thanksgiving recess, requiring the House and Senate to pass either a series of appropriations bills setting government funding levels for the year or a shorter-term continuing resolution (which would carry forward previously set funding levels) before that date to avert a government shutdown.

The president can request anomalies in a continuing resolution alterations to current funding levels for specific issues, although final decisions on what is included in any appropriations bill or continuing resolution are up to Congress.

Senate Democrats included the Iron Dome funding in their draft of the 2022 defense appropriations bill released in mid-October. A source close to the appropriations committee told JI that this was a backup plan to efforts to pass the funding as a standalone measure.

The letter follows clashes over attempts by House Democratic leadership to include the Iron Dome funding in a continuing resolution in September. No Republicans supported that continuing resolution because it also increased the debt limit. The federal government is set to hit another debt limit in the coming weeks, but it is unclear how congressional leadership plans to address it.

Originally posted here:
84 House members call on Biden to push Iron Dome funding in year-end appropriations bill - Jewish Insider

NEW YORK Recent guidance from the US Food and Drug Administration regarding the oversight of laboratory-developed tests has caused mixed reactions from industry stakeholders, including laboratorians, test manufacturers, and professional organizations.

Last week, the FDA announcedthat the US Department of Health and Human Services had withdrawn a policy restricting the FDA's ability to review laboratory-developed tests for SARS-CoV-2. In effect, it reverses the policy, originally established in August 2020, that directed the agency not to enforce premarket review requirements for LDTs without notice-and-comment rulemaking.

As a result of the 2020 policy, test developers were able to distribute their validated tests as LDTs without objection from the FDA as long as the agency was notified.

In October 2020, the FDA also decided not to review Emergency Use Authorizations for LDTsbut was directed by HHS to remove that policy after concerns from labs over reimbursement and liability.

LDT regulation has long been an issue in the diagnostic industry, with confusion surrounding who is in charge the FDA or the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of monitoring and reviewing such tests before they reach the market, and last week's decision is unlikely to be the last word on the matter.

The lab industry has said that LDTs are regulated under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments, which is executed by CMS. The FDA, however, has said that the regulation of LDTs has always fallen within its purview, as well.

Two competing bills are floating around Congress that takeopposite sides of the argument whether the FDA should have oversight of LDTs. In May, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, reintroduced the Verified Innovative Testing in American Laboratories, or VITAL, Act of 2021, that would block the FDA from regulating LDTs.

A month later, though, the Verifying Accurate, Leading-edge ICVT Development, or VALID, Act of 2021 was reintroduced in the US House of Representatives and Senate to solidify the FDA's authority to regulate LDTs and create a new regulatory framework for the tests.

Part of the FDA's reasoning for reviewing and approving new tests, an agency official said, is to make sure the tests are "accurate and reliable." The official noted that the FDA has not enforced premarket review on LDTs unless there are safety concerns, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, a lab has been able to use its LDT while the agency reviews its application for Emergency Use Authorization.

He added that the agency has generally not enforced its premarket review authority unless there is an issue with a test on the market and that the guidance continues the FDA's "longstanding approach" on LDTs. It's a "restoration of FDA's way of doing business," the official said.

However, that gave little assurance to laboratory organizations and laboratorians who worry that the review process will put undue burden on labs trying to make their tests available to patients.

Tom Sparkman, senior VP of government affairs and policy at the American Clinical Laboratory Association, said that the shifting of the requirements puts test developers at a disadvantage, since they can't be sure what the standards are or if they'll be changed without public comment.

He said there's "concern[s] when we see sudden shifts" in LDT policy, and that the "un-transparent gyrations" from the FDA make it difficult for labs to predict how tests they've developed will reach the market and patients.

The new guidance, Sparkman said, will impact laboratories' abilities to bring forward LDTs and will impede the development of innovative tests.

Sparkman also noted that the FDA's relaxing of regulatory standards in February 2020 allowed labs to significantly increase testing capacity during the height of the pandemic by bypassing the more rigorous FDA approval process.

Jonathan Myles, chair of the College of American Pathologists' Council on Government and Professional Affairs, similarly echoed worries about the FDA's recent guidance and said in an email that the organization is "concerned with dramatic policy changes that require pathologists and clinical laboratories to alter operations which further exacerbates personnel shortages that clinical laboratories are currently experiencing."

As the rules are implemented, Myles said he sees potential for "increased testing challenges, since patients often seek traditional testing to confirm results from point-of-care and at-home testing."

And Mark Birenbaum, administrator of the National Independent Laboratory Association, said that there's a concern that FDA oversight will "slow down the introduction of new tests," particularly in an emergency.

The traditional FDA process is "expensive and onerous," especially for labs with fewer resources, he said, adding it causes confusion for labs that aren't familiar with the FDA process, since it's more involved than the usual CLIA pathway, he said.

However, Birenbaum noted that the original policy restricting the FDA's oversight caused problems for laboratories that needed EUAs to get reimbursement from payors for their COVID-19 tests, The new revised policy, which allows labs to receive EUAs, could help ensure that labs get reimbursed for such tests.

Ultimately, Birenbaum said that the withdrawal of HHS' guidance doesn't resolve any of the issues facing labs and is simply a return "to where we were."

Others questioned whether the FDA's guidance foreshadows its LDT plans for the future, including Kelly Wroblewski, the director of infectious disease at the Association of Public Health Laboratories, who said that this "has always been our understanding of how FDA intends to operate in a public health emergency," and that it could signal how the FDA will regulate broader LDTs after the pandemic ends.

The American Association for Clinical Chemistry also is less concerned with the specific guidance and more concerned about "the precedent it may set for FDA involvement in LDT policy moving forward," Stephen Master, president of the AACC, said via email.

"In other words, members are concerned that if the FDA chooses to claim authority over coronavirus LDTs, then it may also use this guidance as a means of claiming broader authority over non-coronavirus LDTs as well," he continued.

He noted that there are questions surrounding why the FDA continues to use guidance to set its LDT policy, rather than going through the normal rulemaking process, which includes a public comment period.

James Versalovic, pathologist-in-chief at Texas Children's Hospital, saidthat the existence of CLIA standards already ensures laboratory-developed tests are highly accurate before they reach patients. "The reality is we need the FDA to monitor efficacy and safety of diagnostics, medications, and vaccines," he said. "But we have to ask ourselves do we have a system that ensures high quality diagnostic testing? And the simple answer is yes," he said, referring to CLIA.

"With additional regulatory hurdles on LDTs many hospitals won't be able to develop tests," he said. "We'd be entirely dependent on big industry to supply tests, and frankly, we will lose the innovative capacity that's provided by so many hospitals and healthcare systems on the front lines."

Dwayne Breining, executive director at Northwell Health Labs, sees it differently, however, and said that the guidance will likely not have a significant impact on his lab, as any of its tests would meet the FDA standards and be able to pass the review process.

The lack of FDA review was a "barn door" that "let a lot of tests through that are overall just much less accurate than would normally be let through," and the new guidance will "tighten up that process," he said. He expects the change to affect more "fringe developers" of laboratory tests, including "entities [that] got into the testing market who don't normally either do diagnostic testing or manufacture diagnostic test[s]."

The new guidance, he said, doesn't hamper traditional lab testing, since professional labs are "already running good tests," but rather is "weeding out these less accurate tests."

"A little bit of regulation is good, as long as it doesn't hamper the good labs getting the testing up and running that they need to get to meet any sort of clinical need," he said.

EUA refocus

Another aspect of the FDA's guidance document relates to the agency's priorities regarding EUA submissions. The FDA said that its focus when reviewing EUA submissions will largely be on at-home and point-of-care tests that can scale up rapidly, although it will also consider molecular lab-based tests that can increase manufacturing capacity.

That change could lead to a backlog in reviews of tests that don't meet the FDA's prioritization requirements, something that would have more of an impact on tests from clinical labs.

Mary Steele Williams, the executive director of the Association for Molecular Pathology, said via email that "it is very worrisome that FDA intends to review only those EUAs it has determined to be high priority tests, which by its own definition will likely exclude many [LDTs] performed at clinical laboratories in academic medical centers and community hospitals/medical centers."

She added that "the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that there are many benefits to diagnostic test results being available in hours rather than days," and that the organization is concerned that "as the number of cases plateau or begin to increase, the country is poised to repeat the same mistakes made at the outset of the pandemic with FDA policies preventing sufficient capacity of crucial diagnostic tests from clinical laboratories that are located where patients receive care and can meet the need for rapid results."

However, manufacturers of rapid tests, such as LumiraDx, welcome news of the FDA's change in focus.

Pooja Pathak, LumiraDx's chief product officer, said that it's encouraging that the new guidance "recognizes point-of-care testsas a potential means to significantly increase testing capacity and accessibility to accurate and reliabletests."

Indeed, overall, test manufacturers saw last week's news as a positive. In a statement, Scott Whitaker, president and CEO of the Advanced Medical Technology Association,supported the new guidance, saying that the organization has "long supported the idea that all diagnostic test developers whether they make in vitro or laboratory-developed tests should be subject to the same FDA standards and processes."

Kyle Mikson, an analyst with Canaccord Genuity who covers the diagnostic industry, said that companies with rapid platforms are better positioned in the market in light of the guidance, and noted that some companies may shift away from COVID-19 testing if their tests don't meet the FDA's new priorities, particularly those that have launched antibody tests which have seen a much less significant demand than other tests.

Rapid platforms are the "next stage" of testing, and the move could lead larger companies, such as Roche, Becton Dickinson, Hologic, or Abbott, to acquiresmaller firms with rapid tests, Mikson said. In addition, companies with tests that are based more in hospitals may need rapid tests to compete in the market, he said.

Mikson also said that there are huge risks for any company or lab that releases a test without approval, since there's a fear that one day the FDA may request further data. He added that he thinks a lot of companies are doing more rigorous validation than is required, just in case the regulations change again.

See the rest here:
FDA, HHS Guidance on COVID-19 LDTs Draws Mixed Reactions from Industry Stakeholders - 360Dx

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)As an event dreaded by millions draws near, Dr. Anthony Fauci is urging all Americans to use COVID-19 as an excuse to skip Thanksgiving with horrible relatives.

Speaking from his office at the National Institutes of Health, Fauci said that the COVID-19 excuse could help prevent a seasonal surge in exasperation and seething rage associated with the Thanksgiving holiday.

COVID-19 could get you off the hook this year, Fauci said. Consider this a doctors note from me.

By using the pandemic as justification for skipping Thanksgiving, Americans can spare the feelings of relatives they despise, the esteemed virologist said.

Tell your aunt from West Virginia that youll miss her, but youll look forward to reading her QAnon theories on Facebook, he advised.

For his part, Fauci said that he intends to employ COVID-19 as an excuse to exempt himself from other unpleasant activities. I plan to use it to avoid seeing Rand Paul, he said.

Read the original post:
Fauci Urges Americans to Use COVID as Excuse to Skip Thanksgiving with Horrible Relatives - The New Yorker

Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. Shes worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35 by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement. Shes bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.

One of the ideas shes absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want whats best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But thats not true, she believes. Woke elitesincreasingly the mainstream left of this countrydo not want what we want, she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. What they want is to destroy us, she said. Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal, but theyve already been doing it for years by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.

As she says this, the dozens of young people in her breakout session begin to vibrate in their seats. Ripples of head nodding are visible from where I sit in the back. These are the rising talents of the rightthe Heritage Foundation junior staff, the Ivy League grads, the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land. In the hallway before watching Bovards speech, I bumped into one of my former Yale students, who is now at McKinsey.

Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epsteins Lolita Express.

Read: Its a weird time to be young and conservative

The atmosphere is electric. Shes giving the best synopsis of national conservatism Ive heard at the conference were attendingand with flair! Progressives pretend to be the oppressed ones, she tells the crowd, but in reality, its just an old boys club, another frat house for entitled rich kids contrived to perpetuate their unearned privilege. Its Skull and Bones for gender-studies majors! She finishes to a rousing ovation. People leap to their feet.

I have the sinking sensation that the thunderous sound Im hearing is the future of the Republican Party.

When I came down to Florida for the National Conservatism Conference, I was a little concerned Id get heckled in the hallways, or be subjected to the verbal abuse I occasionally get from Trump supporters. Judging by their rhetoric, after all, these are the fire-breathers, the hard-liners, the intellectual sharp edge of the American right.

But everyone was charming! I hung around the bar watching football each night, saw old conservative friends, and met lots of new ones, and I enjoyed them all. This is the intellectual wing of the emerging right. Many of them have spent their lives at progressive places like Princeton, New York, Hollywood, and D.C. Their bodies and careers are in the Republican coastal megalopolisbut their minds and mouths are in Trumpland. As one young man told me late one night, Wed like to dislike Bill Kristol, but he got us all jobs.

The movement has three distinctive strains. First, the people over 50 who have been hanging around conservative circles for decades but who have recently been radicalized by the current left. Chris Demuth, 75, was for many years president of the American Enterprise Institute, which used to be the Church of England of American conservatism, but now hes gone populist. NatCons are conservatives who have been mugged by reality, he told the conference. Seventy-three-year-old Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, was a conservative, then a progressive, and now hes back on the right: What has happened to public discourse about race has radicalized me.

The second strain is made up of mid-career politicians and operatives who are learning to adapt to the age of populist rage: people like Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).

The third and largest strain is the young. They grew up in the era of Facebook and MSNBC and identity politics. They went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction. I disagreed with two-thirds of what I heard at this conference, but I couldnt quite suppress the disturbing voice in my head saying, If you were 22, maybe youd be here too.

The Information Age is transforming the American right. Conservatives have always inveighed against the cultural elitethe media, the universities, Hollywood. But in the Information Age, the purveyors of culture are now corporate titans. In this economy, the dominant means of economic production are cultural production. Corporate behemoths are cultural behemoths. The national conservatives thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.

At the heart of this blue oligarchy are the great masters of surveillance capitalism, the Big Tech czars who decide in secret what ideas get promoted, what stories get suppressed. (The NatCon gospel includes great martyrdom stories, such as when Twitter and Facebook suppressed a New York Post story on Hunter Bidens laptop, and when various social-media companies have tried to de-platform The Babylon Bee, the right-wing version of The Onion.) Big Tech is malevolent. Big Tech is corrupt. Big Tech is omnipresent, Ted Cruz roared.

In the NatCon worldview, the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all. Its workers, indoctrinated at elite universities, use wokeness to buy off the left and to create a subservient, atomized, defenseless labor pool. Big Business is not our ally, Marco Rubio argued. They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism. The entire phalanx of Big Business has gone hard left, Cruz said. Weve seen Big Business, the Fortune 500, becoming the economic enforcers of the hard left. Name five Fortune 500 CEOs who are even remotely right of center.

Read: How capitalism drives cancel culture

The idea that the left controls absolutely everythingfrom your smartphone to the money supply to your third graders curriculumexplains the apocalyptic tone that was the dominating emotional register of this conference. The politicians speeches were like entries in the catastrophism Olympics:

The lefts ambition is to create a world beyond belonging, said Hawley. Their grand ambition is to deconstruct the United States of America.

The lefts attack is on America. The left hates America, said Cruz. It is the left that is trying to use culture as a tool to destroy America.

We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life, said Rubio.

The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxismhow the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques. If Id had to drink a shot every time some speaker cited Herbert Marcuse or Antonio Gramsci, Id be dead of alcohol poisoning.

Hawley delivered a classic culture-war speech defending manhood and masculinity: The deconstruction of America depends on the deconstruction of American men. Listening to Hawley talk populist is like listening to a white progressive Upper West Sider in the 1970s try to talk jive. The words are there, but hes trying so hard it sounds ridiculous.

Another speaker, Amanda Milius, is the daughter of John Milius, who was the screenwriter for the first two Dirty Harry films and Apocalypse Now. She grew up in L.A. and wound up in the Trump administration. She argued that America needs to get back to making self-confident movies like The Searchers, the 1956 John Ford Western. This was an unapologetic movie, she asserted, about how Americans tamed the West and how Christian values got brought to savage, undeveloped land.

This is about as dumb a reading of The Searchers as its possible to imagine. The movie is actually the modern analogue to the Oresteia, by Aeschylus. The complex lead figure, played by John Wayne, is rendered barbaric and racist while fighting on behalf of westward pioneers. By the end, he is unfit to live in civilized society.

But we dont exactly live in an age that acknowledges nuance. Milius distorts the movie into a brave manifesto of anti-woke truthsand that sort of distortion has a lot of buyers among this crowd.

The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?

Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government. Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps. Loury asserted that as a Black man he is the proud inheritor of the great Western tradition: Tolstoy is mine! Dickens is mine! Milton, Marx, and Einstein are mine! He declared that his people are Black, but also proudly American. Our Americanness is much more important than our Blackness, he said, before adding, We must strive to transcend racial particularism and stress universality and commonality as Americans. This is the classical-liberal case against racial separatism and in favor of integration.

But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford. The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine. If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, youll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.

Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you cant have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.

Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldnt delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious ordera collective cultural identity.

The history of Judaism demonstrates, Haivry argues, that you dont need a state or a political order to be a nation.

For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christianand has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate. Majority cultures have the right to establish the ruling culture, and minority cultures have the right to be decently treated, he said. To take the minority view and say the minority has the ability to stamp out the views of the majoritythat seems to me to be completely crazy.

Read: How voters feel about Josh Hawleys attack on men

The problem in America, Hazony continued, is that LGBTQ activists today, like American Jews in the 1950s, are trying to expel Christianity from the public square. This threatens to render the public square spiritually naked. Wan liberalism collapses in the face of left-wing cultural Marxism. Eliminating God and scripture in the schools was the turning point in American civilization, Hazony said. Above all else weve got to get God and scripture back in the schools.

Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic. Conservatives have lately become expert culture warriorsthe whole Tucker Carlson schtick. This schtick demands that you ignore the actual suffering of the worldthe transgender kid alone in some suburban high school, the anxiety of a guy who cant afford health care for his brother, the struggle of a Black man trying to be seen and recognized as a full human being. Its a cynical game that treats all of life as a play for ratings, a battle for clicks, and this demands constant outrage, white-identity signaling, and the kind of absurd generalizations that Rachel Bovard used to get that room so excited.

Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.

Christopher Rufo, the architect of this years school-board-meeting protests against critical race theory, argued that conservatives had erred when they tried to slowly gain power in elite cultural institutions. Conservatives were never going to make headway in the Ivy League or the corporate media. Instead, Rufo argued, they should rally the masses to get state legislatures to pass laws embracing their values. Thats essentially whats now happening across red America.

My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state. In these circumstances the right has to use state power to promote its values. We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country, Dreher said. We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.

This is where Viktor Orbn comes in. It was Dreher who prompted Carlsons controversial trip to Hungary last summer, and Hungarians were a strong presence at the National Conservatism Conference. Orbn, in Drehers view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is, Dreher said at the conference. Orbn actually does something about it.

This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values. The culture war merges with the economic-class warand a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites. All your grandparents political categories get scrambled along the way.

Will it work? Well, Donald Trump destroyed the Reagan Republican paradigm in 2016, but he didnt exactly elucidate a new set of ideas, policies, and alliances. Trumps devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines.

The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called the left that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump.

They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life. For people who spend so much time railing about the evils of social media, they sure seem to spend an awful lot of their lives on Twitter. Ninety percent of their discourse is about the discourse. Anecdotalism was also rampant at the conferencegeneralizing from three anecdotes about people who got canceled to conclude that all of American life is a woke hellscape. They need to get out more.

Furthermore, if Hazony thinks America is about to return to Christian dominance, hes living in 1956. Evangelical Christianity has lost many millions of believers across recent decades. Secularism is surging, and white Christianity is shrinking into a rump presence in American life. America is becoming more religiously diverse every day. Christians are in no position to impose their valuesregarding same-sex marriage or anything elseon the public square. Self-aware Christians know this.

Finally, there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.

From the September 2021 issue: How the bobos broke America

One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged. Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated. Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google.

NatCons are also probably right that conservatism is going to get a lot more statist. At the conference, Ted Cruz tried to combine culture-war conservatism with free-market economic policiesfree trade and low taxes. Marco Rubio countered by, in effect, arguing that you cant rally cultural populists if you are not also going to do something for them economically. Cultural populism leads to economic populism. Rubios position at least has the virtue of being coherent.

Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century. But the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it. Thus the display of Ivy League populism I witnessed in Orlando might well represent the alarming future of the American right: the fusing of the culture war and the class war into one epic Marxist Gtterdmmerung.

Sitting in that Orlando hotel, I found myself thinking of what I was seeing as some kind of new theme park: NatCon World, a hermetically sealed dystopian universe with its own confected thrills and chills, its own illiberal rides. I tried to console myself by noting that this NatCon theme park is the brainchild of a few isolated intellectuals with a screwy view of American politics and history. But the disconcerting reality is that Americas rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.

This article originally referred to a New York Post article about Beau Bidens laptop. The Post article was about Hunter Bidens laptop.

Read this article:
The Scary Future of the American Right - The Atlantic