Thread summarizing what we've learned so far of the Fauci/Collins email dump on the Great Barrington Declaration:
It starts on 10/14/20 when Collins instructs Fauci and his staff to "take down" the GBD and the "fringe" scientists behind it.
Fauci responds immediately by circulating an article against the GBD from that austere scientific authority, @WiredUK.
The Fauci-endorsed Wired article is noteworthy for having one of the single worst hot-takes of the entire pandemic. It declared in October 2020 that the GBD should be ignored, because lockdowns were a thing of the past and would not be returning!
The next day, Fauci sends Collins an angry rant against the GBD in the @thenation by @gregggonsalves.
Collins approves.
Far from a scientific study refuting the GBD, Gonsalves's article is a political op-ed attacking @jacobin magazine for breaking "solidarity" with other far-left media outlets on lockdowns. Why? Because Jacobin ran an interview with @MartinKulldorff on how lockdowns hurt the poor.
Over the weekend, Collins launches the smear campaign against the GBD in the Washington Post.
Collins and Fauci email each other about the WaPo hit, with Fauci quipping that the White House was "too busy with other things to worry about this" - perhaps an election reference? - and therefore would not push back on the anti-GBD campaign.
In the meantime, Gonsalves also gets in contact with Collins to volunteer his services (along with future @CDCDirector Rochelle Walensky) to attack the GBD in the media.
Collins approves, and forwards it to Fauci and a bunch of NIH underlings.
In the meantime, @gregggonsalves was having a public meltdown against the GBD on twitter.
The emails get murky around 10/14/20, because the NIH redacted a bunch of emails that appear to be between Fauci and Collins.
Surrounding context suggests they were discussing how to trash the GBD if it came up at the WH Covid task force meeting on 10/16.
On the morning of the Covid task force meeting, Fauci sends Deborah Birx this email alerting her about the need to oppose the GBD at the meeting. The unredacted part suggests they are preparing to attack @ScottWAtlas, who was perceived as the task force's champion of the GBD.
10/16/20 is as far as I've gotten in piecing together the story of what happened. Still more documents to go through, including some more explosive revelations about where Fauci was getting his anti-GBD talking points. So stay tuned!
*typo in the above. The first email about "taking down" the GBD was on 10/8/20 - three days after the GBD broke into the news and went viral.
Are you sure about that? Nikole Hannah Jones claims all the time that she's brought a "new" narrative to light that's supposedly been suppressed for centuries. Ditto with the New History of Capitalism school on the economics of slavery.
I'd argue that this is a common feature of all three: they all assert the novelty of their own work, and do so from positions of profound ignorance of what came before them.
Hannah-Jones, for example, was largely oblivious to the scholarship on slavery and the revolution until after the 1619 Project was already in print. She's spent the last 2 years trying to backfill that by cherrypicking historiography that props up her narrative.
Context: DuBois has complicated and wavering beliefs about Nazism, some of which were very ugly.
Yes - he condemned its anti-semitism throughout. But more than a few times he drifted into "But Hitler also did wonders for the German economy" territory.
This was especially the case with Du Bois during the period of Hitler's alliance with Stalin, which he rationalized by pointing out the similarities of the two regimes along with hoping that it signified Germany would become more Soviet-like.
🧵The recent academic conversation about W.E.B. Du Bois is a prime example of how present-day ideological blinders lead otherwise well-meaning scholars into ideological hagiography. For decades after his death, Du Bois was recognized as a brilliant but also deeply flawed thinker.
Among those flaws were his well-known affinities for murderous dictators on the communist left including Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
Less well known, but thoroughly documented, was his similar flirtation with Nazism between 1936-41.
Du Bois scholarship engaged with this problem in his work, even if only lightly. But it was clearly admitted and acknowledged. Here is David Levering Lewis's Pulitzer-winning bio of Du Bois, noting that his takes on Hitler in this period "ran from equivocal to complimentary."
🧵The racist doctrine of "replacement theory" originated on the progressive left.
It was first articulated in a 1901 article by Edward A. Ross, a leading figure of the progressive movement and a proponent of racial eugenics.
Ross was also an early supporter of Planned Parenthood, and espoused "family planning" as a tool to restrict non-white races from reproducing.
Ross's 1928 book "Standing Room Only" merges replacement theory with a creepy white supremacist spin on birth control that faults non-white reproductive rates for low wages and a litany of related progressive grievances.
The contributors draw heavily on academics who write aggressively ideological "histories" that repackage mundane political opposition to New Deal-style leftism into malicious conspiracy theories.
For those who are interested in the historical complexities of Du Bois's odd opinions about Nazism (and Soviet communism), here is what he wrote about Hitler in June 1940 after the fall of France.
These essays are only lightly examined in existing Du Bois scholarship. The main exception is David L. Lewis's biography, which also notes that they have received very little attention compared to his other work.