Byron Donalds

Rep. Donalds smartly leaned into his Trump endorsement, but he also carved out space for himself, distinguishing his campaign from his opponents by taking the optimist lane. He talked about building Florida to new heights, allowing for businesses and families to flourish, while keeping the government out of people’s lives. His rivals were focused on painstakingly workshopping the next thing they should ban.

Of course, fomenting outrage is a legitimate political strategy, and it’s often successful, unfortunately. Donalds was smart to avoid it. He spoke warmly about both the President and the Governor for eighteen straight months — both men are genuinely beloved by Floridians and retain 90+% GOP approval ratings in the state — and refused to be baited into feuds between their respective supporters. Congressman Donalds is undoubtedly a high-level political operator, and he will need those skills up in Tallahassee.

Donalds had raised a ton of money, with over $51 million still sitting in his war chest. No candidate in either party was remotely close.

He heads into November with a largely unified party. Job well done.

Jay Collins

Nobody hustled harder than Jay Collins, and it showed in how he overperformed the pollsters. Though he still finished over 22 points back.

But sometimes, pure retail energy is not enough for seasoned voters. Ask ten Collins voters what a Collins governorship would look like and you’d get ten different answers. That vagueness is likely part of the reason why Governor DeSantis never endorsed his campaign. Things started off with lots of promise, given that DeSantis handpicked Collins as his Lieutenant Governor and called him the “Chuck Norris of Florida politics.” But eventually, he declined to back him despite being asked point-blank, repeatedly. Collins eventually settled on the explanation that the Governor was avoiding a “proxy war” with Trump. The more accurate read is that DeSantis simply didn’t see a compelling message or a path to victory.

James Fishback

Fishback did successfully inspire a niche of young voters to rage against the machine, and 177,000 votes is not nothing.

More seasoned voters saw what was within the skin suit: a con man, a clown, and a chameleon all in one. A federal judge recently ordered him to pay his former employer more than $1.3 million in fees and costs because he stole proprietary information from them, on top of a separate $229,000 judgment that sent the U.S. Marshals after his possessions. He owes his own lawyers over $150,000 in unpaid bills. Fishback is a narcissistic loser untethered from any value system, and he is now almost two million in the hole. Expect a big podcast launch within the month to start repaying his creditors.

Paul Renner

Paul Renner is a serious conservative with real legislative wins in the state of Florida. Unfortunately, his campaign was a total mess. He ran as something of a DeSantis tribute act and never distinguished himself from the original, pushing all of his chips in with the hopes to receive an endorsement that never arrived. He should have saved the money.

What’s Next?

Byron Donalds enters November with a largely unified GOP and a robust state party apparatus that feels good about its chances of defeating Democrat David Jolly. Governor DeSantis has made it clear that he is on board, too. I like his chances.

Share

In some corners of the conservative movement, Anthony Fauci is likened to a criminal genius: the architect of a bioweapon, the string-pulling conductor of a worldwide operation. Some have declared him a plotting mind so formidable that only an elaborate international conspiracy could explain what he pulled off. Yet this is not a man of competence. The Fauci story is one of a public health bureaucrat with terrible instincts and reasoning abilities, granted virtually unlimited power in the time of a manufactured hysteria.

This article is proudly sponsored by Kalshi — home of the American Power Index (KPOW), the real-time “S&P 500 of politics” that tracks the shifting balance of power between Democrats and Republicans by blending current control with live prediction-market odds.

Dossier readers can sign up for Kalshi for free today and earn up to $500 to make predictions on sports, politics and more.

For decades, Fauci was a career government health bureaucrat of unexceptional ability whose primary skill involved accumulated more power than any unelected American of his generation. He then used those skills to smother risk calculations and create consensus that any intelligent and wise adult would have rejected wholeheartedly.

On Monday, Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the first text chain from what we hope are a series of communications recovered from Fauci’s government-issued iPhone, which HHS finally handed over on August 5 in response to Johnson’s request. His phone is said to hold more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails. Quite suspiciously, it only contains three saved contacts, which probably means that it was tampered with. I do hope that government officials can secure the data that was possibly deleted.

The senators released something of a bombshell that discusses January 2021 communications between Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and future Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. This was just days after former President Biden’s inauguration. The subject is pregnant women and the mRNA injections. In it, Fauci writes that the supposedly “safe and effective” shot “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

One week later, Fauci went in front of cameras and said the vaccines had “no red flags” regarding pregnant women. He later said that there was “no indication whatsoever” of increased adverse events in pregnant women. By September, Walensky and her comrades in the Biden Government Health bureaucracy were strongly recommending vaccination before or during pregnancy.

If Fauci and his goons were level-headed and honest with the public, they would have said something along the lines of “we do not yet know if it’s totally safe, but we think covid is bad, so decide for yourself.”

Instead, they demanded compliance.

In another text in the chain, we get insight into Fauci’s mindset. It becomes clear that he is justifying the risk of miscarriage by declaring “COVID-19 can be a serious disease especially in pregnancy.”

Again, this is in January 2021, one full year into the hysteria. We already knew that the Wuhan sniffles were not harming healthy people. Nonetheless, Fauci decided that catastrophic utilitarianism was the path forward.

At the end of the day, Fauci in his government service was a mediocrity who understood that raising a complication would slow the campaign to create consensus.

This is the same man who told Congress that the absurdity that was the six-foot distance rule “sort of just appeared,” and that he was unaware of any study supporting it. That one nonsensical rule shut down places of worship, bankrupted millions of businesses, and forced the closure of America’s schools. As we documented last month, it somehow became the primary mechanism for the whole shutdown apparatus.

Informed consent just means that the person taking the risk gets all of the information that the person or company recommending it actually knows. A pregnant woman in the early covid hysteria days was entitled to hear what Fauci and his colleagues knew. They swept it under the rug for the “greater good” of maintaining public health order.

Treating Fauci as a supervillain makes a lot of sense when you’re trying to sell copies of something. But the truth of the matter is a lot more sobering. He was an average man with a giant ego, and the absolute worst person to hand unlimited authority over the lives of everyone else. It resulted in predictable disaster.

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Yet it’s not the lab-leak question and the real, widespread confusion surrounding those early days of hysteria that is the scandal here. What we lived through was a seasonal respiratory outbreak converted by an unaccountable bureaucracy and a compliant press into the largest episode of mass hysteria in modern American history. The pathogen was not a significant part of the covid story. The panic and hysteria that resulted in civilizational disruption is.

Agree with my premise or not, but on top of that, Fauci’s “mitigation” record is still indefensible, and Fauci has already admitted it under oath.

In January 2024, in a closed-door transcribed interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci was asked where the six-foot rule came from. His answer, released in full that May: “I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever.” Asked whether he had seen any studies supporting six feet, he said he was not aware of any, and that such a study would be very difficult to do. He called it an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data, or even on data that could be gathered. Asked whether he recalled reviewing any studies on masking young children, he could not.

Now remember what six feet actually did.

That number, pulled out of thin air by government bureacurats, was the load-bearing number of the entire American shutdown apparatus. Six feet set restaurant capacity. Six feet determined whether a gym, a salon, a bar, or a church could open at all, and at what fraction of full capacity. These catastrophic government edicts dictated classroom layouts. A number that “sort of just appeared” was used to reorganize the economic, educational, and social life of 330 million people.

Then the masks. In January 2023, Cochrane published an updated review of physical interventions against respiratory viruses, pooling 78 randomized trials. On community masking it found little or no difference in influenza-like or COVID-like illness across nine trials and some 277,000 participants. Masks never work, but Fauci didn’t care. He found them a useful mechanism to control his sycophantic followers, like a cult leader insisting upon uniforms to showcase compliance.

Quite infamously, in November 2021, Fauci told CBS that his critics were really criticizing science itself, “because I represent science.” Four days after three courageous epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford published the Great Barrington Declaration, Fauci and high level government health bureaucrats waged a smear campaign against the truth tellers. NIH Director Francis Collins emailed Fauci demanding “a quick and devastating published takedown” of what he called “three fringe epidemiologists.” No, not a rebuttal. A “takedown.” The federal government’s two most powerful “public health” officials used their authority to discredit the people asking questions about the legitimacy of their policies.

Between February and April 2020, the number of working business owners in America fell from 15.0 million to 11.7 million. That’s a loss of 3.3 million, 22 percent, the largest drop ever recorded. Many of those businesses never recovrered. The Great Recession, by comparison, took 730,000 over its entire span. Yelp alone logged 163,735 closures by that August, and roughly 60 percent of them became permanent. Peer-reviewed work using California’s full sales-tax filing universe found permanent-closure rates spiking, with small firms hit far harder than large ones.

There were also devastating results for America’s youth. After decades of sustained progress in math and reading, The Nation’s Report Card recorded the largest math decline in its history. Twelfth graders tested in 2024, which is the first cohort to spend all four high school years after the closures, were still way below normal levels. Despite tens of billions in federal dollars infused into the system, the money did not close the gap. Studies showed that the schools that stayed remote longest lost the most.

The hysteria was infinitely worse than the claimed disease itself. From April 2020 through the end of 2021, Americans died of non-covid causes at an annual rate 97,000 above trend. Heart disease, diabetes, drug overdoses, alcohol, homicide, car crashes, etc all went way up. All-cause mortality rose 26 percent among working-age adults versus 18 percent among the elderly. Among children, who were never threatened by a mild respiratory virus, there were essentially no aggregate excess deaths at all. We shut the schools for a supposed viral threat that was not impacting the students whatsoever.

In a just world, Anthony Fauci would spend the rest of his life behind bars. Not because of some massive, hard to track, intelligence agency sourced foreign conspiracy involving Wuhan, China. But because he used his credentials to insist again and again that his devastating authoritarian dictates were absolutely necesssary, and backed by real science. Fauci is a negligent and despotic criminal of the highest order, and it would be a shame if he got away with it. I do hope that he will face some type of real criminal prosecution in the coming days and months while Republicans are still in power.

Share

Subscribe now