Leon Wolf at the Blaze Uses Doublespeak to Exonerate Fauci
- Wolf at the Blaze said a year ago that Fauci didn’t contradict Pompeo, when he clearly did
- Fact Check rating at the Blaze should be revised or deleted for gross inaccuracy
- Wolf boldly says words mean the opposite of their definitions, or can’t understand what ‘contradict’ and ‘dismissive’ mean
Indicted Outlet: Leon Wolf | The Blaze | Link | Archive | 5/5/20
OUR RATING: Major Negligence. MSNBC-level basic journalistic negligence
Lawyers are wordsmiths by nature, they live and die by selecting just the right word or phrase to communicate an idea, or to quibble with a word choice that might be slightly improper. They can be good fact checkers, but in some cases they go too far and their arguments don’t just strain credibility, they enter ‘total b.s.’ land.
Attorney Leon Wolf in The Blaze exonerates Tony Fauci by completely lying about what he said, and by misrepresenting what was argued.
Major Violations:
- Misusing a word
- Lying
- Lying Headline
- Misrepresentation
Here’s the headline:
Fact check: Did Fauci contradict Pompeo on whether coronavirus outbreak originated in Wuhan lab?
Rating: False
So the stage is set to determine whether or not Fauci contradicted Pompeo. Not whether Corona started in a Wuhan lab or not, according to the headline the sole question is whether Fauci contradicted Pompeo.
So let’s start with what Pompeo said, as referenced and quoted by the Blaze:
Pompeo 1: “There’s enormous evidence that that’s where [Wuhan Lab] this [Corona outbreak] began,”
Pompeo 2: “These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”
Pompeo 3: “I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.”
Now let’s examine what the Blaze quotes as coming from Dr. Anthony Fauci:
Fauci 1: “The best evidence shows the virus behind the pandemic was not made in a lab in China.”
Fauci 2: In response to a National Geographic interviewer who asks Fauci: “Sure, but what if scientists found the virus outside the lab, brought it back, and then it escaped?”
“But that means it [Corona virus] was in the wild to begin with. That’s why I don’t get what they’re talking about [and] why I don’t spend a lot of time going in on this circular argument.”
Wolf then states in no uncertain terms that, in terms of the Wuhan lab escape theory:
Fauci does not “dismiss” or “deny” this theory.
And that’s just plainly wrong. Fauci is very clearly denying AND dismissing the Wuhan lab escape theory.
Wolf explains his logic in a fuller paragraph that is worth excerpting in whole:
Fauci does not “dismiss” or “deny” this theory. Nowhere in this answer does he indicate that he does not believe it or has evidence to contradict it. What he does say is that it does not matter to him, as a scientist who is trying to figure out how to defeat the virus, whether the outbreak started in a wet market, as a result of faulty lab procedures, or anywhere else. So he doesn’t think about it or consider it.
There’s no way to sugarcoat this: Wolf is being completely dishonest and disingenuous here. This is a fundamental misrepresentation about what Fauci is saying.
When Fauci says:
Fauci 1: “The best evidence shows the virus behind the pandemic was not made in a lab in China.”
That directly contradicts Pompeo’s statements:
Pompeo 1: “There’s enormous evidence that that’s where [Wuhan Lab] this [Corona outbreak] began,”
Pompeo 3: “I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.”
So the headline, rating, and ultimate conclusion in this Fact Check by the Blaze is completely wrong.
Fauci is completely denying the Wuhan lab theory in his quoted statement.
Additionally, Wolf is wrong when he says categorically that Fauci is not “dismiss[ing]” the Wuhan lab theory, he is ALSO doing that quite clearly in the National Geographic interview.
Let’s recap it again here just in case anyone’s confused:
Fauci 2: In response to a National Geographic interviewer who asks Fauci: “Sure, but what if scientists found the virus outside the lab, brought it back, and then it escaped?”
“But that means it [Corona virus] was in the wild to begin with. That’s why I don’t get what they’re talking about [and] why I don’t spend a lot of time going in on this circular argument.”
This is Fauci dismissing the Wuhan lab theory. He is dismissing it because it doesn’t matter to him, but he’s also dismissing it in context of his other quote where he says the available evidence all points to no.
Fauci is saying both: 1) Corona came from nature, not from the lab, and at the same time he’s also saying, 2) It ultimately doesn’t matter anyway.
This is the definition of ‘dismissing’ a theory. Wolf is misusing words.
The third definition of “dismiss” in Merriam Webster: [1]
to reject serious consideration of
dismissed the thought
Is it accurate to say that Fauci is ‘rejecting the serious consideration of’ the Wuhan virus leak theory? Yes. That is precisely what he is doing: dismissing the theory.
Oddly, if you read the paragraph from Wolf, he tries to say that Fauci is just a good little scientist who doesn’t have all the information and he’s just busy trying to fight bad old Corona. Here’s how he sums it up:
That [Fauci’s quote] is clearly not a denial, or a contradiction, or a statement that he does not believe the theory. It is a statement that the question is outside his purview, so he does not care.
Again, this is not true by the standards of the quotes he’s providing here. This is a misrepresentation.
This is all relevant because, just recently on May 11, 2021 it has been argued by Sen. Rand Paul to Dr. Fauci that the Wuhan Lab added certain features to naturally-occurring Coronavirus that made it much more transmittable. [2] This is called “gain of function” research. There is active dispute at the moment, [3] [4] but the claim is that Dr. Fauci while running the National Institutes for Health, approved a $600,000 grant that went to the Wuhan Lab to study, or whose funds were ultimately used to conduct, ‘gain of function’ in Corona viruses to make the virus more transmittable.
So the question of whether Corona took a vacation at the Wuhan lab is not a scientifically irrelevant question, nor a politically irrelevant one. Many of the finer details get into a great deal of biology beyond the capacity of the layman. [5] But it’s not hard to see why the Wuhan lab is relevant for a variety of motives and reasons.
If Wolf really wanted to split hairs, he could argue that Fauci only said the virus did not ‘come from’ the lab, meaning that it did not originate there. But if you examine Pompeo’s words, they do not claim that the virus was not natural in origin, only that the outbreak came from the lab. This would be to shift the argument from where the outbreak started, to where the virus came from. Wolf doesn’t make this argument in his article, but if pressed that would probably be his equivocation.
Any outlet and publication under the control of Glenn Beck should be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism. An issue that Beck rose to stardom on was the Terri Schiavo case. He was initially disposed against her, then in her favor, but even when he came to the position that Schiavo shouldn’t be needlessly starved to death he still pushed several important lies and misinformation about the case very recklessly. [6]
If this man publishes your news website, even though this was 5 years ago, you should be apologizing to all of us for the next decade or two.
His later conduct was very oddball as well. Beck laid off dozens of center-right journalists the same week as he bought a $200k car. [7] He sued his former colleagues, and brought in “superfans” who led him down a path of lies and corporate destruction. [8] He had to settle lawsuits after getting stories wrong. [9] Former personalities also had to sue him after ‘feeling betrayed.’ [10] Every media outlet gets sued from time to time, but his seem different, they seem chronic. He seems to struggle with consistently telling the truth and keeping people around him who do.
The article that is the subject of this fact check is wrong on many levels. It’s factually incorrect. The headline is wrong. The assumptions are obviously the opposite of the correct conclusions given the evidence. It’s hard to excuse any bit of it.
OUR RATING: Major Negligence. MSNBC-level basic journalistic negligence
Bibliography:
1 ] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dismiss
3 ] https://www.foxnews.com/media/rand-paul-dr-fauci-lied-congress-china-virus-research
5 ] https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain-of-function-disagreement/
8 ] https://www.thedailybeast.com/blazingly-mad-glenn-beck-sues-his-fired-ceo-christopher-balfe
9 ] https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/13/media/glenn-beck-boston-marathon-bombings-lawsuit/index.html
10 ] https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/tomi-lahrens-lawsuit-against-glenn-beck-theblaze-settled
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