PAUL MASSE MOVIE

Over and over, at Senate hearings and in a stream of op-eds, Paul has offered more sensible policy prescriptions and better scientific guidance than Fauci, the CDC, or the media. While schools safely opened across Europe that fall, Fauci and the CDC kept finding reasons to keep American students out of the classroom (and placate teachers’ unions). “When are we going to tell people the truth-that it’s okay to take their kids back to school?” he asked. Paul sounded this theme throughout the pandemic, denouncing Fauci as a “petty tyrant” and “dictator in chief” who needlessly stoked fear to create a “nanny state” and “corral our freedom.” In the spring of 2020, when Fauci referred to the lockdowns as merely “inconvenient,” Paul lambasted him for ignoring the vast economic and social damage, and presciently warned, “Our reaction to the virus may turn out to be worse than the virus itself.”Īt a hearing that summer, Paul summarized evidence from the U.S., Europe, and China that it was safe to open schools, and showed it to Fauci, with charts mounted on easels. That’s what America was founded on, not a herd with a couple of people in Washington telling us what to do and we like sheep blindly follow.” “Only decentralized power and decision-making based on millions of individualized situations can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose. “The fatal conceit is the concept that central planning, with decision-making concentrated in a few hands, can never fully grasp the millions of complex individual interactions occurring simultaneously in the marketplace,” Paul told Fauci. Unlike Smith, he hasn’t read the Declaration of Independence to his jaded colleagues-at least, not yet-but he did invoke Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit at a hearing early in the pandemic, when he was pleading with Fauci to stop locking down Americans in their homes. Paul isn’t as folksy or likable as Jeff Smith (Jimmy Stewart), and his tousled hair isn’t quite as disheveled as during Smith’s epic filibuster, but he, too, likes to deliver lectures on democracy and liberty. Journalists have smeared Paul, and censors have removed some of his scientifically accurate heresies from YouTube, but no one can stop him from regularly berating Fauci at the televised hearings of the Senate health committee.

Like the movie’s media baron Jim Taylor, Fauci’s cheerleaders in the press and on social-media platforms have shamelessly pushed the party line-and worked hard to squelch opposing views, though they prefer to use “fact-checkers” rather than the street thugs whom Taylor hired to silence a rival newspaper.

Like the politicians meekly following orders in the film, most of Washington has bowed to the CDC’s Covid edicts, but Paul has never tired of challenging the agency’s futile policies and dubious science. But we’ve been seeing a version of that plot for two years now, thanks to Senator Rand Paul’s lonely battle against Anthony Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control, and the mainstream press.

PAUL MASSE MOVIE

Critics complain that Frank Capra’s movie is at once too corny and too cynical: one brave senator singlehandedly defending the public good against the thoroughly corrupt political and journalistic establishments. Smith Goes to Washington has never been considered a realistic film.

Paul masse