by liberal japonicus
This interview of Michael Lewis, from the Rest is Politics duo, was truely jawdropping to me. From the transcript, starting here
Where Russell Vought walks into my story is that when I was casting the role of like the human embodiment of the American science project, I cast a man named Francis Collins who ran the human genome project, ran the National Institutes of Health under Trump and Obama and Biden and who, although he was just a mere scientist again running his lab at the NIH, was told he had to pack his bags and leave in 24 hours after Trump was reelected and he was he was told it but he didn’t know who had actually issued the order and in the back of his mind he had a some suspects in his head but he didn’t know who they were and probably the prime suspect was Russell Vought because the mere fact that Francis Collins didn’t know who fired him suggested Russell Vought [because] his fingerprints are never there and what intrigued me was that even if Russell Vought hadn’t actually, you know, put the bullet in the back of this scientist’s head, he had allowed it to happened was that […] and this is getting at Russell Vought’s soul. The scientist Francis Collins in his early career had discovered the genetic source of cystic fibrosis that eventually leads after some decades to a treatment for cystic fibrosis and goes from being a death sentence in children to being something now that’s take a pill and you live and Russell Vought’s daughter had it and so he is plausibly a person who could know that this scientist basically saved his child’s life and not let it get in the way of what needs to be done. And he’s regarded as like a ruthlessly efficient Washington insider.
Checked the timeline, the directed treatment of CF was introduced in 2019 and Vought’s daughter was born in 2014, so Lewis is correct in observing that there is a straight line from Collins’s efforts saving Vought’s daughter. This article, lauding how their pro-life views inform the raising of a daughter with CF and written in 2014, so the Vought’s (who are now apparently divorced) daughter’s life was saved by the work that Collins did. And Vought took the step to fire him 24 hours after Trump was re-elected.
Suum cuique.
https://www.nationalmemo.com/russ-vought-divorce
The Voughts, apart or not, just like all of the top echelon of the lawless, Timothy McVeigh-loving MAGA conservative genocidal murderers, most of them Christians, were ecstatically happy to traumatize the decent public servants of USAID, who, along with their professional competent colleagues are no longer permitted to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of third world brown and black children, including those with cystic fibrosis and other deadly, preventable diseases.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-28-year-old-doge-operative-gutted-usaid-hr-had-no-record-of-him-working-there/
They hate all of us and our children.
They, especially the rightwing Texans among them, are to us what the Russians are to Ukrainians, and what rightwing Israelis and rightwing Muslims are to each other, subhuman Death merchants.
One does hope for a long vicious reign of suicidal non-empathic vengeance against them.
Monsters. I keep thinking of Hitler and the old question: Why did the German people let people like that get power? Because we don’t recognize the monsters among us. In fact, our societies reward many of the qualities that make them monsters. How many people will condemn that DOGE operative? He’s one of America’s winners and I bet he just goes on to get more and more rewards in terms of jobs and salaries and respect.