For Some Trump Apologists, the Cognitive Dissonance Is Just Too Much

I glanced at the story, read it, and then moved on to something else. But the story of William B. Crews kept bothering me, because it might be a harbinger of things to come.

Crews is—or was—an employee of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the federal agency run by Anthony Fauci. While working as a public-affairs officer for NIAID, Crews was also a prolific conspiracy theorist. He spent the past six months attacking Fauci,  NIAID, and the American scientific establishment more generally, on the website Redstate.com, using the pseudonym “Streiff.” On Monday, Lachlan Markay of The Daily Beast published a story unmasking him. Crews abruptly retired that same day.

The United States has a long tradition of government employees criticizing their superiors., and many others of turning the coronavirus into a deliberate plot to undermine the Trump administration. In June, America’s most respected scientific bodies: “If there were justice,” he wrote, “we’d send and [] few dozen of these fascists to the gallows and gibbet their tarred bodies in chains until they fall apart.” In July, he : “If you made those recommendations and they were disastrously wrong and based on bad science that you promulgated, you owe it to all of us to STFU and go away.”