It is easy to call people you disagree with “insane”. But it is rarely an accurate description. People can be stupid, bigoted, unthoughtful, opportunistic, cynical, cruel, and loud - but they are not usually insane. Lara Logan, however, may be. There is no psychiatric definition of insanity, so for this diary, I will use the legal definition. To wit,
Insanity. n. mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior.
With that in mind, the jury should consider Lara Logan’s mental state when she said the following,
“What you see on Dr. Fauci – this is what people say to me: that he doesn’t represent science to them. He represents Joseph Mengele. Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps because the response from Covid, what it has done to countries everywhere, what it has done to civil liberties, the suicide rates, the poverty, it has obliterated economies.”
Unlike many zealots, Lara Logan purports to be a journalist. A serious journalist. Once, it looked like she might be the new Ernie Pyle. But this is not something a journalist would say. It is the ravings of a lunatic. The language is incoherent. She butchers syntax. She has a Trumpian inability to speak in sentences. And she cannot differentiate fantasy from reality.
Nazi allusions are always the sign of a weak argument. And the language she uses points to hysteria rather than reason. Comparing Dr. Fauci to Joseph Mengele is deliberately provocative, appealing to emotions rather than thought. Fauci may have made mistakes. After all, plans have to change as circumstances change and we know the enemy better. But to compare him to the doctor infamous for his medical experiments, especially on twins, in Auschwitz is hyperbole — and bat-shit crazy.
Mengele’s behavior was described as thus,
“The experiments he performed on twins included unnecessary amputation of limbs, intentionally infecting one twin with typhus or some other disease, and transfusing the blood of one twin into the other. Many of the victims died while undergoing these procedures,[51] and those who survived the experiments were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected once Mengele had no further use for them. [52] Nyiszli recalled one occasion on which Mengele personally killed fourteen twins in one night by injecting their hearts with chloroform. [32]”
Does Logan have any evidence that Fauci has done anything like this? Of course not. It is crazy talk.
Let’s look at the rest of her remarks. “And I am talking about people all across the world are saying this”? No names? Who are these people? Nobody knows. “People are saying” has become a euphemism for “I just made this up”.
Logan is in lockstep with the paranoid wing of the conservative movement. She believes that individual liberties are sacrosanct and not to be interfered with regardless of the effect on the community. In times of war, America has had rationing and conscription. People complained. Some dodged the draft. But most people accepted there were times when individuals have to make sacrifices. But the spirit of “we are all in this together,” and “everyone has to do their bit,” is gone. Clinging to individual rights in a time of crisis is not patriotic.
Logan makes factual errors. She talks about an increase in suicides. However, the number of suicides in the US declined 5% from 2019 to 2020. A checkable fact that any reputable journalist, regardless of their personal feelings, could have discovered in less than a minute.
She alludes to a rise in poverty and “obliterated economies”. Yes, a global pandemic was an economic damper. But the economic effects are less severe than we have experienced in some human-caused recessions and depressions. No economy has been obliterated. And while there are residual effects, labor shortages, rising prices, and bottlenecks, these point to an increase in demand that is hardly the hallmark of a failed economy.
Logan makes the common error of mistaking correlation for causation. The world suffered a global pandemic, and governments took measures to combat that pandemic. This does not mean that the measures necessarily caused the effects of the pandemic. You could equally well argue that the flaccid, uncoordinated, and purely political response of the last President and Republican governors to the crisis exacerbated its effects. If people had just sucked it up, been vaccinated, and worn masks, it is likely we would now be in a better position.
And why haven’t people embraced these measures? It is because conspiracy-theory conservatives led campaigns against vaccine and mask mandates. This blend of politics and paranoia has prolonged and deepened the effects of Covid.
If people must drag WW II-era Germany, concentration camps, and Mengele into the conversation over Covid, it would be more accurate to say that conservative media, conservative politicians, and fundamentalist Christians are the ones playing the role of the Nazis.
Evidence? It is the unvaccinated who are the vast majority of people in hospital suffering medical insults. And in their case, doctors are doing their level best to keep them alive.