Fauci Files: A Megalomaniacal Egomaniac Milking Covid For Everything It's Worth

Authored by Tom Elliott via Substack,

On May 28, 2021, Anthony Fauci learned that the Department of Health and Human Services would refer EcoHealth Alliance - the New York nonprofit that had routed NIAID money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology - to its inspector general. That night he wrote in his diary:

"I am certain that there will be some deficiencies that the IG will find as is always the case with IG audits. Certainly, whatever they find it will be misconstrued by those who want to make a case for our involvement in the outbreak. I am starting to feel that it is important for me to write an editorial or an opinion piece giving our side of the story." (p. 753)

Our involvement in the outbreak. Followed closely by a plan to get out in front of it.

That instinct - get ahead of it, control the story, decide what the public needs to believe and then saturate every channel with it - is the organizing principle of these documents. It shows up in the origins fight. It shows up in masks, transmissibility, and boosters. It shows up in how he handled the people who disagreed with him. And it shows up, most revealingly, in what he chose to write down.

What was released

On July 24, Senator Rand Paul's committee published two documents that have not been reported in any depth.

The first is Fauci's personal diary, 1,141 pages, running from late 2019 through his retirement in December 2022. It is partly a journal and overwhelmingly a scrapbook: he pasted hundreds of articles about himself into it, frequently in full.

The second is 136 pages of internal email about his awards - nominations, ethics clearances, and the disposition of prize money.

Fauci does not date the composition of his entries, so we cannot always distinguish what was typed the same evening from what was assembled later. Page numbers refer to the released PDFs.

I. What they thought at the start

Page 13 of the diary covers two important events from January 31, 2020.

The first is that Fauci is handed the mic to serve as Covid's point person. He writes:

"White House is now fully convinced that I be the science/health spokesperson for the USG. Bob Redfield just does not come across very weel. He takes forever to say something and it is usually wondering. This drives the WH and HHS comms people crazy and so they are putting me out on all the requests."

The director of the CDC was not sidelined for being wrong, but for being slow on camera. The selection criterion was not who's the most credible scientist, but who performs best on TV.

Redfield's own account of that period, given under oath in 2023, is worth recalling. Asked why he had been excluded from the origins discussions, he pointed to ideological differences: "Because it was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view."

The second thing happens after he gets back to his office. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust calls, sounding "very concerned," with Kristian Andersen of Scripps conferenced in and Eddie Holmes in the background from Sydney. Fauci writes down what they told him:

"The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furine cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary 'jump' that they found nowhere in bat isolates."

Deliberate insertion, they said, followed by release - accidental release being the most likely.

The next day Fauci convened a larger call of twelve experts in epidemiology. His entry characterizing it (p. 14) is the probably the single most consequential paragraph in the whole diary. There was "not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion," he writes. Ron Fouchier was certain it could have arisen naturally and said they shouldn't waste time. Christian Drosten agreed with Fouchier. And then, in Fauci's own words:

"the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible."

Ten of twelve thought it must be manmade. And he admits the person driving the zoonotic theory perspective, Ron Fouchier, was "expected of him since he was the original GOF [gain of function] person with Yoshi Kawaoka."

II. What happened next

Three days later, four of the scientists from that call were circulating a draft arguing the opposite. "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" appeared in Nature Medicine on March 17, concluding that the virus was not a laboratory construct. Andersen told the journal in his cover note that the paper had been prompted by Fauci and Francis Collins. Drafts went to both men before publication. Fauci's reply to Andersen: "Nice job on the paper."

Two months after Proximal Origin published - Fauci's institute approves an $8.9 million grant for Andersen.

On April 16, Collins wrote to Fauci asking whether NIH could help "put down this very destructive conspiracy." The following day, Fauci cited Proximal Origin from the White House briefing room podium - the most watched platform on earth at that moment.

Three weeks after that, on May 4, 2020, he told National Geographic that the evidence was "very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," citing "a number of very qualified evolutionary biologists."

The doubt referenced in his diary never reached the public.

And his account of that February call has never stopped changing.

A June 7, 2021 diary entry (p. 767), recounting the same meeting: "About half of the people felt that this was possibly a constructed virus and the other half were convinced that this was a natural occurrence."

In a June 3, 2024 sworn opening statement to the House Select Subcommittee, Fauci said he joined a call with about a dozen international virologists, that the discussion was "lively, with arguments for both possibilities," and that after further examination several who had been concerned about lab manipulation became convinced the virus was not deliberately manipulated.

The June 2021 retelling contains another problem: he says "a few weeks later" Andersen and colleagues re-examined the data and concluded natural origin. The draft was circulating on February 4 - three days after the call. The June 2021 entry shows how he's trying to mould history into something different for posterity.

III. Habit becomes routine

Origins is where this pattern is most consequential, but it is not where it started or where it stopped. The diary shows the same strategy applied to every contested question of the pandemic: decide what the public needs to believe, then flood the zone.

Consider masks. Fauci's public reversal in the spring of 2020 is well known, and he has explained it as a response to shortages and to emerging evidence on asymptomatic spread (p. 375). But watch what happens when the question comes back around in February 2021, when he begins pushing double-masking (p. 619):

"CDC starting to do practical things that I have actually been pushing for some time. For example: Wearing 2 masks could be better than just one. They did a dummy study and showed that a cloth mask over a surgical mask actually gives a more complete fit and keeps out aerosols."

Note the order of operations: He had been pushing it "for some time," the evidence arrives afterward, and the evidence is a mannequin. That is the entire evidentiary basis for double-masking in a 1,141-page diary kept by the government's chief spokesman on the subject during the month he was urging 330 million people to adopt it.

We see every time Fauci is turned to for guidance, he makes bold proclamations without feeling burdened to verify any scientific basis. We see it in the numbers.

Across 1,141 pages by the nation's senior infectious disease official during the largest public health event in a century, here is how often certain terms appear.

Never once: "peer review." "Meta-analysis." "Risk-benefit." "Learning loss." "Mental health."

Once: "N95." "Seroprevalence." "Cost-benefit."

Twice: "Cloth mask." "School closure." "Natural immunity."

Against which:

• "Award" - 80
• "Hero" - 49
• "Instagram" - 36
• "Bobblehead" - 23
• "Selfie" - 19
• Entries headed "PRESS:" - 641

The question of whether prior infection conferred meaningful protection - the question underpinning the vaccine mandates that cost people their jobs - is never worked through anywhere in these pages. It appears twice, both times as an attack to be repelled.

IV. The flex

What the diary contains instead of evidentiary reasoning is an extraordinarily detailed record of influence.

March 15, 2020: Fauci records calling Bill de Blasio and convincing him to close New York City's schools, then telling him he should close the bars and restaurants, too - de Blasio "said that he would base this on my recommendation." He records a parallel call with Ann O'Leary, Gavin Newsom's chief of staff, who tells him that based on his television appearances, California will close its schools, bars, and restaurants. He records walking out of the White House to drivers honking their thanks. The next morning, federal guidelines emerge "that reflected my pushing for a more aggressive mitigation 15 day strategy."

So here we have Fauci humble bragging about shutting down the largest city and state in the country, via leverage that was entirely a function of being the man Gov. Newsom & Mayor de Blasio watched on TV.

His impact extended beyond the continental United States. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett requested a Zoom to secure Fauci's "opinion and ultimate support" for Israel's booster program, recorded it for his own Instagram, and asked for Fauci's cell number so he could "intermittently call me for advice"; with State Department approval, Fauci gave it (p. 830). The presidents of Ecuador and Chile called. So did health ministers in Brazil, Gabon, Israel, and Quebec.

The MLB commissioner wanted guidance on spring training; the NHL players' union wanted projections (p. 507). Bill Gates had a standing biweekly slot. Coach K, on a podcast, called him "the point guard for the world," and Fauci wrote it down (p. 83).

Then there is the CDC, which he seemed to be furtively running through his cellphone.

May 13, 2021: Rochelle Walensky calls to say she is changing the mask guidance for vaccinated Americans. Fauci: "She will take my advice ... I'm very pleased that she listened to me." Then the tell - "The radical right-wing maniacs who blamed me for the rigidity of the CDC recommendations will probably not realize at all that it was me that triggered this change" (p. 736).

September 2021: the CDC's independent vaccine advisory committee votes 9-6 against the booster recommendation the White House wants. Fauci, the White House's Jeff Zients, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Leslie Dach - a Democratic operative who founded the advocacy group Protect Our Care - work the phones. Fauci texts Walensky and, in his own words, "begged her to override" the vote. She calls back at 11:25 p.m.; he misses it; they speak at 5:40 a.m. His entry: "Alas! Rochelle listened to me. She overruled the recommendation of the ACIP." He congratulates her on finally showing "clear leadership" (pp. 883-884, 887).

So, Zients had been calling him "multiple times per day asking me to continue to mentor Rochelle such that the CDC/ACIP does not veer too far off the FDA recommendations and our ultimate intent" (p. 880).

We can only guess what their "ultimate intent" is, but recall the context is loosening rules for those who've agreed to be vaccinated.

In January 2021, Zients called Fauci at dinner "asking for a favor" - a Politico reporter was preparing a story that Biden was unhappy with his COVID team, and Zients wanted Fauci to go on background and say otherwise. "I told Jeff that I would of course be happy to do this," Fauci wrote (p. 580). The next day: "I convinced them that the Biden team is a good team." In March, Zients wanted him "comfortable with" the CDC's forthcoming guidance for vaccinated people; Fauci reviewed it, decided the agency had loaded it with qualifiers, and "edited their document some what." Without a hint of irony, Fauci then adds: "Jeff was very sensitive in not having the White House interfere" (p. 642).

Here we have three nominally independent agencies, a White House coordination office, and a party-aligned outside operative, converging by telephone on predetermined outcomes, with the advisory committee that voted the other way treated as an obstacle to be routed around. This is the structure that enabled them to steamroll actual, data-driven scientists.

V. Threats to the structure

Real science requires dissent. But to Fauci, who once infamously likened himself to science itself, treated dissent as a danger to his entire enterprise.

Scott Atlas, the Stanford radiologist Trump brought onto the task force, generated an October 2020 email in which Fauci formally demanded his removal "from the Task Force and quite frankly from the White House itself" (p. 388). Days earlier, Fauci had recorded a meeting between Alex Azar and "Atlas and his 3 stooges" - Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard (p. 390) - a week before those three published the Great Barrington Declaration. After a Good Morning America appearance that month, Fauci, trying to squelch these burgeoning critiques, congratulates himself: "I blew away the Great Barrington Declaration" (p. 406).

Richard Ebright, the Rutgers microbiologist who has been the most persistent scientific critic of NIAID's gain-of-function portfolio, is "truly an asshole" (p. 834); then a man pushing lab-leak because he "wants to be somebody" (p. 888); then "this complete idiot" whom Fauci resolves to handle in his memoir "since he really is a horrible person" (p. 906). In the same passage he writes that he is "terribly disappointed" in virologists Jesse Bloom and David Relman and believes they are "pushing for and even hoping that this was a lab leak."

Then April 2021 (p. 695), David Morens has told Fauci that people are trying to "bring me down." Fauci takes umbrage that these critics have received funds from the agency he was running: "It is my suspicion that some of these so-called NIAID grantees are Imperiale and Rich Ebright."

He notes that both have publicly claimed he would cut their funding for criticizing him, calls that preposterous - then closes the entry: "Let us see if in fact these are the villains."

You can only imagine him as Inspector Gadget gently stroking his cat as he typed those words.

VI. Fauci's colleagues, the press

The most revealing aspect of these pages are how Fauci worked with compliant "journalists" to shape media narratives. On July 26, 2020, while watching Brett Giroir - the assistant secretary for health and a fellow member of the White House task force - be interviewed on CNN's State of the Union, Fauci writes that Giroir was "talking bullshit about testing with Jake pressing him." Then (p. 263): "I gave Jake some questions to ask him."

So, a senior federal official is trying to undermine a rival federal official, using a CNN anchor as his conduit.

The diary records CBS's chief medical correspondent, Jon LaPook, emailing Fauci over a weekend "to prep him for his interview" before going on air, then cited Fauci repeatedly during it (p. 2). LaPook later produced the admiring 60 Minutes profile Fauci credits with driving Trump "over the edge."

Fauci even got stories killed, at least according to his telling: In January 2020, the Washington Post's Lena Sun called to check a tip that Beijing had leaned on the WHO's director-general to delay declaring an emergency; Fauci told her it was nonsense and wrote, "I probably stopped her from writing the story" - noting that Sun had come to him because he is "in all the important meetings" (p. 7).

Members of the corporate media make many embarrassing cameos in these pages: Jake Tapper sends Fauci a text making fun Laura Ingraham's intelligence (p. 113) and twice hosts Fauci for dinner at their family home (p. 420); George Stephanopoulos texts after an interview, "Thank you, Tony. So impressive" (p. 264); Andrea Mitchell calls his cell, apologetic, having assumed he had declined her show rather than been blocked from it (p. 235); Jimmy Kimmel writes his TIME 100 citation in the year he was ranked first among "Leaders," another puff piece he saves for his scrapbook (p. 357).

The pattern becomes easy enough to understand: He supplied access and the guise of expertise, they supplied a platform and a halo, and the arrangement was load-bearing enough that when a reporter got a genuinely hard tip about the WHO and China, she brought it to him before she wrote it.

VII. The scrapbook

Which brings us to what the diary mostly is: 641 entries in these pages are labeled "PRESS:" - lists of the day's media appearances, often a dozen at a time, frequently followed by the articles themselves transcribed in full. A senior scientist's pandemic journal turns out to be, by volume, a clipping service devoted to his favorite subject: himself.

The tone of what he preserved is worth registering. He kept the Washington Post column comparing a Rand Paul cross-examination of him to "watching Albert Einstein being disputed by his dry cleaner." He kept the Joan Baez portrait and her calling him an American hero (p. 292). He kept the cookies from Joe and Jill Biden with the note "You are our hero" (p. 175), and Julia Roberts gasping on an Instagram livestream that he was her personal hero, and Marian Wright Edelman calling him "a true national treasure" (p. 1113), and Beth Cameron of the NSC texting that he was her hero for what he did with Rand Paul (p. 815).

By my count he records someone calling him a hero at least 10 times across three years.

He recorded a standing ovation he could not see because he was attending by Zoom, noting in the same passage that it would be his 58th honorary doctorate and that Holy Cross was naming a science complex after him (p. 951). He recorded a Seattle Mariners crowd's ovation three separate times in one entry - claiming his opening pitch was "perfect" - alongside a complaint that the Washington Examiner had reported some fans booing (p. 1,020). He recorded being "totally mobbed by my colleagues wanting selfies. I must have done at least 100 (no exaggerating!)" (p. 1084). When the Infectious Diseases Society of America established a perpetual Anthony S. Fauci Prize, he transcribed the entire citation (p. 1086).

Anthony Fauci, writing in his diary in March 2020, clearly loving life: "Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 25, 2026

And then there is the second document Sen. Paul's office released, which shows that a good deal of this was not happening to him. Our tax dollars were helping arrange it.

In October 2018 - 14 months before any of this - Barton Haynes of Duke nominated Fauci for the Shaw Prize. Fauci wrote back the same day (Awards, p. 2):

"Thanks, Bart. There is another one that looks possible for me if you are willing to do it. As usual, I will supply all of the material. It is the Dan David Prize."

As usual? Four days later he pitched a third and wrote the strategy himself (p. 4): the Heinz Award, category "The Human Condition," using the PEPFAR record - "We obviously will take care of all of that on my end." He coached Haynes through qualifying as a nominator, noting the "minor glitch" that the Heinz people require a CV first "because they do not want just anyone nominating anyone." He tracked prize calendars like a portfolio, telling Haynes to stand down on the Dan David until "medicine/science returns as a theme" (p. 5). He collected it two years later.

The Dan David Prize - $1 million, headquartered at Tel Aviv University - announced Fauci as its 2021 public health laureate on February 15, citing his "courageously defending science in the face of uninformed opposition." None of the coverage mentioned that the nomination pipeline had been running since 2018 with the laureate supplying the materials.

Every message in the awards file copies NIAID staff, who assembled packages, chased clearances, and eventually arranged a wire transfer. NIH's ethics counsel was described by her own superior as playing "the seminal role in assembling of the award packages" (p. 19). (Which sounds like the opposite thing an ethics counsel should be doing.) That superior was Lawrence Tabak, then NIH's principal deputy director, who personally wrote to HHS General Counsel arguing across several pages that Fauci should be allowed to keep the $40,000 attached to a National Academy of Medicine award - invoking the Academy's 1863 charter, a 1997 amendment to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and a Congressional Research Service report (p. 30). Days earlier Tabak had written to Fauci about the delays: "my goal is to support you in the strongest possible way" (p. 18).

When the Dan David Prize cleared on April 9, 2021, the internal traffic was preserved (pp. 120-121). Arthur Bennett: "At last!!!!!!!" Patricia Conrad, forwarding to Fauci: "Congratulations....you're rich!" Greg Folkers: "I want my 15%."

We know the sum to the penny because Fauci corrected his own financial disclosure the following spring (p. 135): "The Dan David prize that was deposited in my bank account was $899,960.00, not $901,400."

Technically soliciting one's own nomination is not illegal, and in elite science it is not even unusual - most major prizes require a qualified nominator. But here we have some pretty well-scaled machinery: a federal agency's staff and the NIH's chief ethics counsel running a standing campaign, a legal argument built at the deputy-director level so a cash prize could be retained, and roughly $900,000 landing in the personal account of a sitting official who had arranged the nomination that produced it.

The final verdict

These two document dumps go a long way helping us understand how the sausage is made.

The White House needed a face that performed well under lights; governors needed cover for decisions they had half-made and took it from a man whose authority came from TV hits rather than peer-reviewed studies; a press corps needed access and a protagonist and traded a halo for both; a White House coordination office needed a scientist willing to serve as an anonymous source, edit another agency's guidance, and lean on another agency's director when her experts voted wrong. Foreign leaders needed the imprimatur of Official Science on a phone call. NIH's own leadership needed the world's most famous scientist happy, and built him the legal argument to keep his bank account flush.

And Anthony Fauci got the largest edifice of public esteem ever assembled around an American civil servant - much of which, it turns out, he had personally arranged the scaffolding for, starting 14 months before the first case of Covid.

Fauci's blast zone was wide: On a public told that guidance was science when the diary records it as message discipline and mannequin studies; on three highly credentialed academic epidemiologists who found themselves recorded as stooges; on a CDC director cut out of briefings on her own agency's guidelines; on an advisory committee whose 9-6 vote was reversed by telephone before dawn; on international agencies leaning on U.S. officials for guidance, on everyone who lost a job over a mandate ...

The story began with Fauci acknowledging his own panel of experts virtually unanimously agreed Covid was manmade, before shifting to the elaborate effort put into convincing the world otherwise. Throughout it all, we see little discussion or concern about the humanitarian impact of anything they're doing. Instead we see a craven egomaniac milking it for all it's worth.

* * *

Both documents are public at paul.senate.gov: the diary at 1,141 pages, the awards correspondence at 136. Page citations refer to the PDFs as released; word counts are raw string searches of the extracted text and include pasted press. Quotations preserve original spelling. Dr. Fauci's representatives were contacted for comment.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 18:20

Money Issues, Paranoia, And A Hurled Phone: Blistering Reports Detail Ken Martin's Collapsing DNC

The Democratic National Committee is running on fumes, and chairman Ken Martin is headed for a full-blown mental breakdown, according to a pair of blistering reports.

A New York Times report published Sunday revealed that the committee is $2 million in the hole and begging vendors to sit on their invoices until after the midterms.

The DNC quietly put the Southeast Washington building up as collateral last year to land a $15 million line of credit and bankroll off-year races, according to DC deed records not previously reported, according to NOTUS. The party has pawned the property, which it only partially owns, in past cycles. But going back to the well ahead of 2026 for the biggest off-year loan in committee history set off alarms among members who saw it as one more flashing red light.

"Ken gaslighting us about the DNC's finances and not being transparent about the financial situation makes us doubt if he can oversee the DNC during the most important primary of our lifetime," an unnamed DNC member told NOTUS.

The Republican National Committee is sitting on $128.5 million, and President Trump's main super PAC, MAGA Inc., closed out June with roughly $400 million in the bank.

The DNC has downplayed the alarm. Roger Lau, the committee's executive director, told the Times that the request for vendors to hold their invoices was "nothing more than standard negotiations with vendors over contracts and payment processes."

Meanwhile, the pressure mounting on Martin is showing, according to the Times:

In a pique of frustration in early July, he threw his phone at the desk of a junior aide while upbraiding the person. The phone-tossing incident resulted in a formal complaint to the D.N.C.'s human resources department.

The fallout from the phone-throwing episode was described by half a dozen people familiar with the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal party matters. None of them witnessed the encounter, and there was some dispute over how aggressively the phone was tossed. Mr. Martin was said to have thrown the phone at the desk, rather than at the aide.

Unsurprisingly, the DNC refused to comment on the incident.

To make matters worse, Martin has reportedly developed a "growing sense of paranoia" about a possible push to dump him and is "paralyzed by the idea of leaks."

"It pisses me off when I see leaks out of this building," Martin lamented during a meeting in May. "No more of that shit. No more."

"My success is your success," he added. "So the weaker I am, the weaker all of you are."

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 16:55

Activists Target WNBA Player After She Takes Stand Against Trans Agenda

The WNBA only has two real stars with any meaningful popular following - Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham.  Both of them built reputations as underdogs in a sport traditionally dominated by minority players espousing far-left politics.  Both of them have been mistreated in the past by a league that tends to play nursemaid to those same players. 

The WNBA has long been a cultural joke, not just because its reputation for low standards of athleticism, but because they are constantly whining about "equal pay", "social justice" and LGBT issues.  The league spends so much energy on activism that they've forgotten about the game and the fans.  No one likes a bunch of crybabies making demands. 

The national interest in Caitlin Clark transcends politics; people like her because she takes the game seriously and plays at a level far above most of her peers.  Her mere presence on the court now often brings in double or even triple the normal WNBA viewership.    

On the other hand, Sophie Cunningham has gained a reputation as an enforcer.  While Caitlin Clark is being persistently battered with flagrant fouls disguised as "accidents", Cunningham has decided to dish out some fouls in return.  The Martial Arts trained player has decided to "sweep the leg" on the league and she's no longer letting the abuse slide.

 

This month she went viral for pointing her finger in the face of a black player (DeWanna Bonner) after multiple fouls against Caitlin Clark without referee intervention.  Bonner flipped out over the gesture and the WNBA was unhappy.  A white girl pointing with condemnation in the face of a black player was viewed by the political left as unacceptable.  The fans loved it. 

This week, Cunningham was in the news again, this time because she took a public position on "trans women" (men) being allowed in women's sports.  Cunningham argued that she doesn't hate trans people, but:

“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that.’ I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

She later doubled down when confronted by the media:

“I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense. And I think I’ll always believe in that. I think it’s really important to protect children, and that’s little girls who are also involved in that category. And so I’ll stand on what I said, and I’ll always believe that.” 

Rule #1 when dealing with the political left:  Never apologize to the political left.  It won't shut them up.  They will smell blood in the water and attack even more aggressively.  Cunningham seems to understand this rule well.  

In response, the media has gone on the attack, admonishing Cunningham for her comments.  Leftists on social media are calling for her to booted from the league.  Some are burning her jersey in an effort to inspire a boycott of her merchandise.

  

However, as usual, whenever leftist try to boycott someone it ends up backfiring.  If a bunch of mentally ill gender fluid weirdos want to buy her jerseys just to burn them, Cunningham will be happy to take their money.  Beyond that, her willingness to go against the progressive agenda of the WNBA has also earned her a lot of respect.   

Almost overnight, Sophie Cunningham merchandise has sold out online, including her exclusive basketball shoes in women and men's sizes.  Clearly, the public has decided who they think is right on the issue of transgenders in women's sports.  Multiple conservative politicians and the White House have come to her defense on the national stage. 

Like it or not, everything has become political, even women's basketball.  But this is largely due to media and establishment interference.  Progressive journalists are constantly acting as agents of the woke movement, demanding that people with a public platform swear fealty to the cause or be ostracized.  These activists got a little too comfortable with their cancel culture power over the past decade; so much so that they don't realize how quickly it's all disappearing. 

More and more people are refusing to bend the knee, and sports figures like Cunningham working in the midst of these vicious piranhas should be commended for standing by their principles.     

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 15:45

ASU Just Made 'Influencing' A College Major

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Arizona State University has decided the path to success runs straight through TikTok dances, personal branding, and "strategic storytelling."

The school's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication is now offering a full Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation, explicitly designed to turn students into influencers who can "thrive in the rapidly evolving creator economy."

The program's description states that students will learn content planning, video and podcast production, global perspectives, and personal branding. They will analyze performance metrics, experiment with content strategies, and complete a capstone where they pick a platform - TikTok, Instagram, YouTube - and spend a semester growing an actual audience with measurable results.

Arizona State University is now offering a 'Content Creation' major for students wanting to become social media influencers.

Students in the program will learn how to "market themselves."

"The Bachelor of Arts program in content creation prepares you to become an influencer and... pic.twitter.com/wnqdeA2C7H

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 24, 2026

By graduation they are supposed to walk away with a real online following and "proof they've successfully built a digital brand."

Just an inkling, but Walter Cronkite would probably never have wanted to be associated with this.

Jessica Pucci, senior associate dean at the Cronkite School, insisted the curriculum goes far beyond ring lights and dance challenges. She told local media the program delivers "professional-level guidance from faculty dedicated to helping students succeed in the rapidly evolving creator economy."

It does just look like TikTok dancing though, lets be honest.

Students, she said, will leave with something more tangible than a diploma: a following, published content, and data-driven proof of brand-building.

Critics on social media were less impressed. One commenter noted they learned the same skills in their bedroom at 14 for free on YouTube.

Another fully supported parents who refuse to bankroll this particular "education."

A third accused the university of simply cashing in on a trend without teaching anything of lasting value. Even some who saw potential in the creator economy wanted the program to include basic adult skills - mortgages, savings, taxes - before handing out the degree.

This is the latest shiny product from a higher-education industry that has spent decades converting campuses into ideological finishing schools while loading students with debt for credentials the market treats as optional at best.

Clay Travis recently cut straight to the economic root of the resulting rage.

"These highly educated young far-left Democrats hate capitalism because they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on degrees the country DOES NOT value," Travis said. "They spent $200,000 on a women's studies degree [meanwhile] plumbers and electricians are driving better cars and making MORE money. They're furious the world is valuing other people's labor more than their own. They should take a lesson... GET USEFUL SKILLS."

An influencer major fits the pattern perfectly. Four years, six figures of tuition and living costs, and the graduate emerges prepared to compete in an attention economy already saturated with teenagers who figured out the algorithm without a single student-loan payment.

The university collects the money either way. The student is left holding the resentment when the market declines to subsidize their "brand".

That resentment does not stay private. It becomes the fuel for the radical politics that now dominate so many campuses. Universities have become propaganda factories that manufacture disturbed leftists who treat practical competence as suspect and identity politics as the highest form of knowledge.

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a required first-year education course for future teachers pushed extreme ideology on immigration, race, and gender. Leaked slides urged "humanizing language," framed border enforcement as white supremacy, and trained students to resist ICE rather than master classroom fundamentals. A whistleblower reported the class spent its time on activism while ignoring how to actually teach math or reading.

Kent State University displayed student "art" depicting President Trump's severed head on a pike with the caption "We only have to get lucky once." Administrators initially defended it as protected expression before public pressure forced its removal.

Princeton hunger strikers camping for Gaza complained the university was not monitoring their vital signs and accused officials of deliberately weakening them. One insisted, "They are not keeping track of our vitals. They are not at all taking care of us," while another claimed the group was "literally shaking" and "immunocompromised."

Joe Rogan described the broader phenomenon without restraint. Universities, he said, have become "cult camps" where students get locked into identities and try to sound profound without life experience.

"If I was going to try to destroy the country, that's how I would do it... I would radicalize the kids, give them the stupidest ideas... Boys can be girls. Girls can be boys... 'Queers for Palestine.' Death to the Jews." He added: "You guys are doing nonsense. You go to cult camp. You're indoctrinating people."

At Columbia, occupiers who had broken into campus buildings demanded food and water as "basic humanitarian aid," comparing themselves to refugees. PhD student Johannah King-Slutzky asked, "Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you?" The performance collapsed under mockery once the NYPD cleared the building.

The ideological capture reaches the sciences. A survey of 200 UK university scientists found only 58 percent would say sex is binary; 42 percent refused. Nearly two-thirds said gender is fluid.

Language itself is rewritten. The University of the Arts London erased "woman" from maternity and menopause policies, declaring the processes apply "irrespective of gender" and that "not all pregnant people are women."

The University of North Carolina issued an inclusive language guide that discouraged "mother" and "father" in favor of "guardian" and purged words containing "man."

Stanford's "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" proposed adding "American" to its blacklist as too U.S.-centric, recommending "U.S. citizen" instead.

Stanford University has deemed the word "American" to be harmful language.

pic.twitter.com/gclBOoE8Sn

— Ian Miles Cheong (@ianmiles) December 21, 2022

These are not isolated excesses. They are the logical output of institutions that treat useful skills as secondary to political formation.

Students graduate with expensive credentials that signal ideological reliability rather than competence, then discover the economy does not share their self-assessment.

The resulting bitterness is redirected at capitalism, borders, biological reality, and anyone still willing to call a woman a woman.

ASU's content-creation major is simply the newest exhibit. It packages the attention economy as an academic discipline, charges premium tuition for skills freely available online, and sends graduates into a labor market that will judge them by results rather than feelings.

When those results disappoint, the university will have already collected its fees and moved on to the next cohort of future radicals. The rest of the country is left paying the social cost of an education system that prioritizes 'branding' over building anything of lasting value.

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Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 15:10