Read it.

Father Matthieu Raffray, a Catholic priest of the traditionalist society Institut du Bon Pasteur, posted a video to social media last month encouraging Christians to fight against their sins, which he says are forms of “weakness.” Among the sins Raffray named was homosexuality. He preached, “We all have weaknesses: those who are greedy, those who are angry, those who have homosexual tendencies!”

The priest faced immediate backlash from LGBTQ activists and organizations, and French Minister for Gender Equality and Fight Against Discrimination Aurore Bergé called Raffray’s preaching “unbearable.”

Politico.

Each day in San Francisco, vendors line busy city streets with a plethora of fully packaged items: shampoo, mouth wash, multi-vitamins, deodorant and laundry detergent.

Mayor London Breed calls it “Walgreens on the sidewalk” — a confluence of the city’s struggles with unchecked shoplifting, its fentanyl addiction crisis and a state law that has made it extremely difficult to get the vendors off the streets, even if they are selling stolen goods.

Breed is now pushing to change that law as widespread frustration with retail theft and the blatant sale of stolen merchandise threatens her reelection bid.

Read it.

Anti-Israel activists were caught on camera chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel” at a rally in Dearborn, Michigan, video posted by the non-profit Middle East Media Research Institute.

Otherwise known as “Dar-al-Islam West”.

Read it.

In a bizarre news segment, a transgender person who used to refer to himself as the “human Ken doll” attempted to lecture JK Rowling on what a woman really is, declaring that the author should “stick to what she knows.”

The Atlantic.

age is the subject of a new book by the political scientist Tom Schaller and the journalist Paul Waldman. White Rural Rage, specifically. In 255 pages, the authors chart the racism, homophobia, xenophobia, violent predilections, and vulnerability to authoritarianism that they claim make white rural voters a unique “threat to American democracy.” White Rural Rage is a screed lobbed at a familiar target of elite liberal ire. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the authors appeared on Morning Joe, the book inspired an approving column from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, and its thesis has been a topic of discussion on podcasts from MSNBC’s Chuck Todd and the right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk. The book has become a New York Times best seller.

Would a book entitled Black Urban Rage and subtitled The Threat to American Democracy (as White Rural Rage was) even get published nowadays? The question answers itself.

Washington Free Beacon.

As a middle school principal, New York Democratic congressman Jamaal Bowman advised against teaching about “white” historical figures like George Washington, Jesus Christ, and Santa Claus. Instead, he used his position to elevate a renowned anti-Semite and cop-killers.

While speaking at a 2018 conference hosted by the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO), Bowman detailed his pedagogy as the principal of the Bronx middle school he founded, Cornerstone Academy for Social Action (CASA). He encouraged educators to instill “self-empowerment” in their students by pushing back on “white” cultural figures, citing Washington, Jesus Christ, and Santa Claus as detriments to his students’ success.

“You can’t have self-directed learning without self-empowerment,” Bowman said. “If our kids don’t love themselves, if they don’t love who they are and where they come from, and they’re told that Santa Claus, and George Washington, and Jesus Christ—all these white hope, great people—are the standard, how are they going to feel about themselves?”

Read it.

If you’re curious about effective legal immigration measures, here’s a good example: Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, has extended an offer of 5,000 free passports for highly skilled professionals.

We’re offering 5,000 free passports (equivalent to $5 billion in our passport program) to highly skilled scientists, engineers, doctors, artists, and philosophers from abroad.

This represents less than 0.1% of our population, so granting them full citizen status, including voting rights, poses no issue.

Despite the small number, their contributions will have a huge impact on our society and the future of our country.

Plus, we will facilitate their relocation by ensuring 0% taxes and tariffs on moving families and assets. This includes commercial value items like equipment, software, and intellectual property.

The Antiplanner.

Less than half of New York City residents feel safe riding the subway today, down from 82 percent before the pandemic. Subway crime is so bad that New York’s governor called out the national guard to patrol subway stations. Crime is up on San Francisco BART trains despite the agency putting more police on trains. A few days ago, a mentally ill person stabbed someone to death on a Portland light-rail train.

Power Line.

This is from Britain’s Telegraph, but I think we would see similar numbers in other countries, and worse in some:

Only one in four British Muslims believe that Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on Oct 7, a major report has found.

The numbers are even worse for “educated” Muslims:

Younger and well-educated Muslims were the most likely to think Hamas did not commit atrocities on Oct 7, with the proportions rising to 47 per cent among 18 to 24-year-olds and 40 per cent among the university-educated.

There is, of course, no doubt about the fact that Hamas (i.e., Gaza) committed murder and rape on October 7. Hamas terrorists proudly videoed and broadcasted their crimes. They didn’t try to cover them up, but rather boasted of them. So why do their supporters now deny that these crimes, which many Muslims celebrated at the time, took place?

Read it.

The following report concerns enricher-on-enricher violence in a French middle school. Apparently the young female victim had been following scandalous Western customs in dress and behavior, and was accordingly taught a lesson by her classmates.

This story concerns the savage beating of a young schoolgirl by three schoolmates. The local French press is downplaying the religious aspect, but it appears that the victim is a Muslim girl who was too Westernized for her Muslim schoolmates.

Read it.

Two shootings at fast food restaurants in Democrat-run cities went viral last week, after enraged customers went off on employees during arguments.

The Foundry.

Most news outlets rely on The Associated Press style guide—officially known as the AP Stylebook—as the arbiter for grammar, spelling, and terminology in news coverage. While AP puts forth its style guide as an impartial rubric for fair coverage, its rules often exclude conservative views from the outset.

Take AP’s latest round of updates, released Friday. The updates include guidance on how to avoid “stigmatizing” obese people, admonitions to avoid calling people “homeless” as it might be “dehumanizing,” and warnings to avoid the term “female” since “some people object to its use as a descriptor for women because it can be seen as emphasizing biology and reproductive capacity over gender identity.”

AP’s style guide prefers “anti-abortion” and “abortion-rights” as adjectives, urging journalists to avoid “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” and “pro-abortion.”

Yet one of the largest sections of the updated style guide involves “climate change,” a term that AP says “can be used interchangeably” with the term “climate crisis.”

Read it.

A small group of demonstrators disrupted the Lincoln Park Apple Store in Chicago on Saturday to protest Apple’s use of labor in Africa and its disciplining of at least one employee wearing pro-Palestinian clothing items.

The political is personal.

Read it.

Today, states across the country are beginning to actively embrace pro-sound-money legislation, inviting a critical examination of how America abandoned the gold standard of money and racked up $34.5 trillion in debt. To understand how we got here, it’s important to understand the policy that initiated our monetary decline.

The four horsemen of the American apocalypse: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon.

Politico.

As the Navy’s largest U.S. trade show gets underway on Monday, officers in charge of the service’s marquee shipbuilding programs won’t offer the usual briefings with reporters and analysts about them.

That break from the tradition of sharing program updates at the Navy’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition comes just days after the Navy announced that four of its most critical shipbuilding programs are years behind schedule.

The Navy’s top admiral and civilian secretary have still not responded to questions about a damning Navy report released Tuesday outlining the sweeping failure of the Navy and its industrial partners to make expected progress on two submarine programs, an aircraft carrier and a new class of frigates.

Read it.

Specifically, Democrat leaders.

From President Biden to the mayors of small cities, Democrats have been trailed by demonstrators who are complicating the party’s ability to campaign in an election year.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

In Detroit, a congressman’s holiday party devolved into chaos and a broken nose after demonstrators protesting the war in Gaza appeared with bullhorns.
In Fort Collins, Colo., the mayor abruptly ended a meeting during which protesters demanding a cease-fire in Gaza glued their hands to a wall.
And in places as disparate as a historic church in South Carolina and Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, President Biden has been heckled and drowned out by demonstrators objecting to his support for Israel.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Read it.

As in other European countries, mass migration to Switzerland has resulted in “housing shortages and rising rents, traffic jams on the roads, crowded trains and buses, falling standards of schools, increasing violence and crime, electricity shortages, income stagnating per capita, ever-higher health insurance premiums, indebted social services, and increased pressure on the beauty of the landscape and the preservation of nature,” according to the party.

The UDC previously warned that the country was being subsumed by mass migration, with new arrivals from Africa having welfare rates of 34 per cent.

Around two-thirds of prison inmates in Switzerland are foreign nationals, with Algerians representing the highest proportion.

Read it.

n May 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation, known as the Johnson-Reed Act, that severely restricted the number of immigrants by putting quotas on their country of origin, and completely excluded immigrants from Asia.

Among other things, the act brought to an end a historic migration of Jews to the United States, and set in place restrictions that would keep Jewish refugees out when the Nazis rose to power a decade later.

Wikipedia.

The Gakken EX-System is a series of educational electronics kits produced by Gakken in the late 1970s. The kits use denshi blocks (also known as electronic blocks) to allow electronics experiments to be performed easily and safely. Over 25 years after its original release, one of the main kits from the series was reissued in Japan in 2002.

I wish I’d had this when I was a kid. Heck, I wish I’d had it when I was being trained as an Electronics Technician in the Navy.

OffGuardian.

together at a table.  She with a laptop open before her and he with a coffee and a book.  Looking at the screen, she says to him,“I didn’t know that the solar eclipse lasts for 70 to 80 minutes, going from partial to full, and the full eclipse lasts just 3-4 minutes.”

The man replies: “And if you’re lucky, the partial eclipse lasts more than 70 to 80 years, because then the full eclipse is forever.”

She acts as if she doesn’t hear him, as if his sardonic humor has nothing to do with her death anxiety or with the media’s celebration of the darkness visible of the total solar eclipse due to occur on April 8^th across North America that the media is calling “eclipse mania,” while failing to mention they are promoting it as such.

Construction Physics.

Buying a home is by far the largest purchase most of us will make, and paying the rent or mortgage will be our largest monthly expense. In the post-pandemic home-buying boom, the median sale price of a new home peaked at almost $500,000 dollars, just under seven times the median household annual income that year (though it has since fallen). Most new homebuyers will pay around 30% of their income on their mortgage, and the median renter in the bottom quintile of income spends 60% of their income on rent.

Because of the enormous costs of housing, it’s worth understanding where, specifically, those costs come from, and what sort of interventions would be needed to reduce these costs. Discussions of housing policy often focus on issues of zoning, regulation, and other supply restrictions which manifest as increased land prices, but for most American housing, the largest cost comes from building the physical structure itself. However, in dense urban areas — the places where building new housing is arguably most important — this changes, and high land prices driven by regulatory restrictions become the dominant factor.

People concerned about building more housing are right to pay attention to zoning and land use rules: over 100 million Americans live in places where most of the cost of residential property comes from the land itself. But they should not neglect the physical costs of building homes, which are overall more important. Unfortunately, as we’ll see, reducing these physical costs is far from straightforward.

Power Line.

It Wasn’t Fauci: How the Deep State Really Played Trump, the documentary Scott recently posted, outs Deborah Birx as the villain in the Covid drama. The case is strong, but there’s a back story people should know.

In 1985, Birx began her career with the Department of Defense as a “military trained clinician in immunology, focusing on HIV/AIDS vaccine research.” That was the project of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose bio showed no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology. In 1984, Fauci became head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the federal agency responsible for development of vaccines. Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), went on record that Fauci “doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” But he was, controlling public health policy and spending on medical research, a huge concentration of power.

Fauci contended that AIDS was caused by HIV, a claim disputed by Mullis, Peter Duesberg, Charles A. Thomas, and other leading medical scientists in “The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis.” See Duesberg’s Inventing the AIDS Virus, a virtual post-grad course in virology plus an exposure of Fauci.

Read it.

Captain John Konrad, CEO of gCaptain, a website specializing in tracking the shipping industry, blames the “West Point Mafia” and decades of land wars in the Middle East for a hollowed-out US Navy that was entirely “unprepared” for the salvage operation of the collapsed 1.6-mile-long Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland.

Konrad explained, “Truth is bridges are an Army Corps of Engineers responsibility but they are so unprepared they gave the job to Navy Salvage to lead. Navy salvage is so broken they had to outsource it to the US subsidiary/partner of a European firm which is chartering equipment from private companies at great expense.”

“And it’s the Army’s own fault. The West Point Mafia has systematically destroyed our nation’s maritime strength,” he said, adding that China would’ve had the Baltimore shipping channel “fully cleared in weeks,” not months (read more about the reopening timeline here).

Read it.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) paused the implementation of its climate disclosure requirements for companies as legal challenges against the rules are pending in a circuit court.

Read it.

On April 1st, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed a bill into law that ended her state’s more than three-year-long experiment with legalization of so-called hard drugs. The choice of day notwithstanding, her decision to sign the bill that reintroduced criminal penalties for the use of those drugs was no joke. It was a badly needed end to a reckless experiment in childish libertarianism with humans as guinea pigs.

Fox News referred to Governor Kotek’s decision as a “U-turn on a short-lived liberal policy,” which is a fair description insofar as the policy move is concerned. However, the big losers here are the libertarians who wanted legalization in the first place. As far as they are concerned, the Oregon reversal raises an existential question for their very ideology.

As we will see in a moment, libertarians who celebrated the Beaver State’s legalization when it was implemented are now strikingly silent. To the extent that they do offer comments, they only reinforce the impression that the Oregon reversal has the potential to become the death knell of American libertarianism.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy for solipsists. They use the term ‘statist’ where proglodytes use the term ‘racist’ but the mindset is much the same.

Read it.

Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella The Minority Report created “precrime,” the clairvoyant foreknowledge of criminal activity as forecast by mutant “precogs.” The book was a dystopian nightmare, but a 2015 Fox television series transforms the story into one in which a precog works with a cop and shows that data is actually effective at predicting future crime.

Canada is trying to enact a precrime law along the lines of the 2015 show, but it is being panned about as much as the television series. Ottawa’s online harms bill includes a provision to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future.

Power Line.

I want to strike a Nietzschean note in this comment on the rideshare ordinance enacted by the City of Minneapolis this past month. Under the ordinance, Uber and Lyft would be required to pay drivers a minimum rate of $1.40 per mile and 51 cents per minute to ensure that they earn the equivalent of local minimum wage of $15.57 per hour — effective May 1. The city council overrode the mayor’s veto to enact the ordinance.

Uber and Lyft would be required to comply with the ordinance, that is, if they are still around on May 1, but they will both be out of Minneapolis by then. Indeed, Uber will depart the entire Twin Cities metropolitan area.

Raise the minimum wage = destroy jobs. You’d think they would learn.

Read it.

French electric marine drive specialist BlueNav is preparing to put a more natural spin in its lineup. The all-new Whale Design propeller features blades that follow the contours of a whale to improve system efficiency. The unique propeller is set to debut in the company’s electric outboard and inboard drive systems to further improve upon the efficiency and versatility they add to existing boats.

Founded in 2020, BlueNav is focused on the gradual electrification of private and commercial boats. In contrast to companies focusing all their energy on pure-electric boating, BlueNav has taken a hybrid tack, developing “BlueSpin” electric propulsion solutions designed to be used in conjunction with a boat’s original combustion engine.

Read it.

The age of overpopulation is over. The age of underpopulation is here. After decades of warnings and fear about an overpopulation crisis, population is now rapidly declining in most of the world. The overpopulation disaster predicted by world elites did not occur.

Total fertility rate is the average number of children born per woman. Demographers tell us that a country’s fertility rate must be at least 2.1 children per woman to sustain the current level of population.

According to data from the United Nations, total world population still continues to rise, but population is declining in all major nations, where fertility rates have fallen below the minimum population replacement rate. Africa is the only continent where the population continues to grow. According to birth rates and without counting immigration flows, population is now falling in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, the United States, and all European nations except Monaco and the Faroe Islands.

Read it.

A Syrian culture-enricher stabbed and seriously wounded a 4-year-old girl in the German town of Wangen. Because the perpetrator carried a Dutch passport, he is referred to as a “Dutchman” in many mainstream media accounts of the incident.

Read it.

Liberals are mounting a pressure campaign to force liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire from the bench so President Joe Biden, who faces a tough reelection fight in November, can appoint a younger liberal successor before the election.

The Foundry.

Before voters approved a constitutional amendment to make their state the 28th in the nation to ban private funding of election administration, Wisconsin’s capital city, Madison, already had spent over $1 million in private grants.

Madison, like jurisdictions in three other states that ban private dollars from paying for elections—Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri—is a member of the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The organization, founded by the left-leaning Center for Tech and Civic Life, doled out $350 million in election-administration grants in 2020 funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.

Wisconsin’s move to ban private money to pay for elections was significant progress for election integrity but not a silver bullet, said former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative.

The Spectator.

The Biden administration is bracing for a second Trump term by rolling out a rule that would complicate Donald Trump’s pledge to fire tens of thousands of federal workers if he wins in November. The new rule is also a huge gift to the public-sector unions that Joe Biden needs firmly in his corner.

The latest edict, issued by the US Office of Personnel Management, is an almost direct response to Trump’s stated plans to purge the bureaucracy. That’s not how the OPM is framing it, of course; instead, OPM deputy director Rob Shriver said it “is about making sure the American public can continue to count on federal workers to apply their skills and expertise in carrying out their jobs, no matter their personal political beliefs.”

Those political beliefs caused never-ending ire in the Trump years, of course. One political appointee in the Trump administration relayed a story to The Spectator about how when his boss, a cabinet secretary, needed to have his color printer ink restored during the Covid-19 pandemic, he was stymied by career employees, who told him that the office needed to be vacated for ten days before they felt safe showing up to work. Despite several stages of escalation, the most they were willing to do was turn on a different printer on another level in the building. “There’s a career mindset that they were here before you and will outlast you,” he said.

Public employees are a huge component of the Democrat ‘base’.

Read it.

The “trans” industry’s assault on America’s youth includes persuading kids that they “really” are a boy rather than a girl, or vice versa. Sex change operations don’t come immediately; rather, the preferred sequence begins with puberty-blocking drugs. The rationale is that the effects of these drugs are reversible, so they merely buy time to allow the kid to sort out his or her “gender.”

But are the effects of puberty-blocking drugs actually reversible? Will the boy or girl be magically restored to his or her original self, after a few years in sexual limbo? Many have seen this as a dubious claim, and a number of countries have now banned the administration of puberty blockers along with banning sex change operations on minors. The U.S. is an outlier in our apparent enthusiasm for the “trans” regime.

The Guardian.

When the office of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, announced that it would be suing the world’s largest meat company, JBS, for misleading customers about its climate commitments, it caused a stir far beyond the world of food. That’s because the suit’s impact has the potential to influence the approach all kinds of big businesses take in their advertising about sustainability, according to experts.

Not to mention driving even more businesses out of New York.

OffGuardian.

You know how #SolutionsWatch replaced #PropagandaWatch three years ago? Well, I found a piece of propaganda so crazy, so self-contradictory, so hilariously reaching, so weirdly self-deconstructing that it has to be heard to be believed. Feast your ears on this wet hot dumpster fire of nonsense served up by the very confused propaganda pushers over at NPR.

The National Interest.

The US military’s reliance on traditional warfare methods, like aircraft carriers, faces challenges in the modern era of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategies, making them increasingly obsolete. The alternative, submarines, particularly the Virginia-class, are crucial yet insufficient due to budget and industrial limitations. Moreover, the emergence of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), coupled with artificial intelligence and advanced detection technologies, threatens to render submarines obsolete as well. Despite these advancements, submarines remain vital in current great power dynamics, especially against China, highlighting the need for continued adaptation in military strategies to maintain effectiveness in future conflicts.

The sub in the header photo is not a U.S. sub but rather a Russian Akula.

Read it.

personality called Matt Forney popularized the term, or depending on your outlook, slur, “tradthot.” According to Forney, a “tradthot” (a portmanteau of “tradwife” and “thot”) was a woman who entered the alt-right pretending to believe in traditional gender roles but, in reality, wanted to exploit a male-dominated audience by catering to their fantasies.

‘Thot’ is an acronym for ‘that hoe over there’. It usually refers to women who trade sex for money, not officially as a ‘working girl’ but unofficially as a species of gold-digger.

Forney, although not well-known for his charitable views about women at the time — he’s since repented, naturally — may have been onto something. While his original article unfairly characterized the specific women he offered as examples, all of whom turned out to be genuinely committed to the values they espoused, what he described ended up reflecting a real phenomenon.

In the years that followed, the “tradthot” — the Traditional Woman who created content seemingly for everyone except other women — became a thriving and lucrative genre of internet personality.

Go to YouTube and search for ‘Steven Crowder’ to watch a tradthot in action.

Politico.

If you’ve been watching television or tracking trending topics over the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen or read something about “white rural rage.” This is owed to the publication of a new book, White Rural Rage, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, whose thesis is that white rural Americans, despite representing just 16 percent of the American electorate, are a “threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”

In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Schaller gave this unvarnished assessment of the rage he sees overflowing in the heartland. Rural whites, he said, are “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” He called them, “the most conspiracist group,” “anti-democratic,” “white nationalist and white Christian nationalists.” On top of that, rural whites are also “most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.”

This premise has triggered a backlash towards rural voters from some on the left. Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon, said she’s tired of handling rural voters “with kid gloves,” and time has come to pop the “racist, homophobic, sexist bubble” they all live in. Daily Beast columnist Michael Cohen agreed, writing that “these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.” David Corn, the D.C. bureau chief at Mother Jones, piled on, agreeing that “white rural voters [are] the slice of the public that endangers the constitutional future of the republic.”

Amanda Marcotte is famous for her hatred of non-proglodyte America, as are the people who write for Daily Beast and Mother Jones.

Read it.

Recently released Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol Police security video shows a suspected FBI special agent clapping and cheering as crowds surged up steps to the Columbus Doors and another meeting with an FBI tactical team just before it entered the Capitol after the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt.

The videos were first identified by defendant William Pope of Topeka, Kansas, in court filings in his own Jan. 6 criminal case. Exhibits Mr. Pope originally filed under seal have become public since the release of thousands of hours of Jan. 6 security video by the Committee on House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

An aspect of our increasingly ideological age is the things that used to be a part of the culture that have been removed by force or by neglect. The parts pried loose and discarded are easy to see, as they come with an angry mob of deranged lunatics there to do the damage. The bits that are just forgotten and fall out of the shared reality that is our culture are the things missed only by those who remember them.

Read it.

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory researchers found the promise of coating the inner surface of the vessel containing a fusion plasma in liquid lithium guides them toward the best practices for fueling their plasmas.

Read it.

A Pfizer-funded, peer-reviewed paper authored by Pfizer scientists reveals that the company’s antiviral COVID medication Paxlovid completely sucks, confirming what everyone’s known since it came out.

The New Neo.

This is an interesting documentary that makes the point that it was Dr. Deborah Birx rather than Fauci who set a great many of the COVID policies that hurt the nation. It also portrays Trump as a victim of Birx, helpless to effectively send a counter-message.

I see it as somewhat different: Birx was instrumental in the lockdown chain reaction, but so were many other players including Fauci and in particular many state governors (especially in blue states). Social media and the press were a big part of it, too, censoring and often ridiculing those who saw it differently. And although Trump tried to counter that, it was a relatively weak effort and not very successful – although granted, he wasn’t a health expert and was relying on those who supposedly were.