Accountability shouldn’t depend on who you know or how you vote.
Americans live by the promise that their institutions and leaders are impartial arbiters of the law and defenders of citizens’ rights, no matter their background or political affiliation. However, anyone paying attention in recent years must have noticed the disparate treatment afforded certain individuals as compared to others.
A journalist explores the boundaries between participation and coverage. A public health official privately acknowledged and publicly ignored inconvenient COVID-19 data. The head of a major teachers’ union pits public educators against federal law enforcement doing its job in her state. There are blatant double standards for the prominent people, and they only serve to further erode Americans’ weakening faith in their institutions and amplify political tensions in an already polarized country.
Norms took a big hit over the last half-decade.
My group, Protect The Public’s Trust, exposed former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci having acknowledged in private emails that natural immunity was more effective than vaccine-based immunity for the COVID-19 virus. In these emails sent between Fauci and his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control in 2021, Fauci admitted that an Israeli study showing that natural immunity is more protective against COVID-19 reinfection and symptomatic disease than vaccination was “rather impressive.” Though admitting the strength of the Israeli study, these so-called public health “leaders” never admitted this publicly, as it would’ve gotten in the way of their insistence that every American must take a COVID-19 vaccine, even those with infection-induced immunity or whose age or physical fitness provided protection from severe symptoms.
This is shocking but hardly surprising in an office where Fauci’s senior adviser, Dr. David Morens, boasted about “FOIA-proofing” email communications (using a personal email to avoid the Freedom of Information Act), and which didn’t publish some data out of “fear that the information might be misinterpreted.” Fauci, his organization, and the public health bureaucracy overall squandered the trust of the American people and have not been held to account for it.
Nowhere are double standards more evident than in the response to the actions of Don Lemon and his subsequent arrest. Legacy media figures condemned the arrest as “unprecedented” and a “threat” to the First Amendment, seemingly oblivious to the First Amendment rights of the parishioners Lemon and his activist friends obstructed. One would be hard-pressed to find similar condemnations by these outlets of the arrests of other practitioners of journalism, such as Steve Baker and James O’Keefe.
Of course, misconduct seems to be a feature of America’s public education community as well. While educators around the country were shown to be violating state law by covertly renaming their favorite DEI initiatives, others were abdicating their duties as educators in protest of America’s law enforcement.
The Saint Paul Federation of Educators – a prominent Minnesota teachers’ union – demanded that its members strike over Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducting deportations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. Led by board president Leah VanDassor, an educator and progressive activist, the union’s board published a letter urging its 3,500 members to engage in a “day of action” where they would stay home and disrupt class to protest the Trump administration’s enforcement of federal immigration laws in their state.
“Our union has never backed down from challenging and difficult choices.” One thing they apparently have backed down from is actually teaching kids. To invoke a well-worn cliché, “You had one job!” Test results from the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment released last year revealed that nearly two-thirds of students in Saint Paul Public Schools were not proficient in reading, and nearly three-quarters did not demonstrate proficiency in math. As for the immigrants the union cares so much about, only eight percent, less than one in 12, English as a second language students in the district were proficient in the standardized test they were given. As parents across the country are increasingly recognizing, this is the very predictable result when your schools choose activism over education.
U.S. institutions, from midwestern teachers’ unions on up to seats of federal power in Washington, D.C., are riddled with people whose respect for law and official probity end at whether they like the law and whether probity is convenient for them. Such people are unworthy of the institutions they hollow out and the trust of the citizens they are failing.
Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
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