Every family has a wine aunt who makes weddings and holidays a chore. Her second glass of Sauvignon Blanc turns her into a lawn sign with legs, and she starts repeating slogans: Why don’t you believe in science? America is a nation of immigrants! Trans women are women!
In her day job as an administrator for a nonprofit organization or an associate vice president of human resources, Aunt Madge is an enforcer. She lives to police boundaries. You can’t say that! She has no thoughts. She says the slogans. She is received wisdom, embodied, and she knows that what you said isn’t true, because she hasn’t seen it in The New York Times. Yes, she owns some version of this shirt.
Wine aunt’s mind, to the extent that she has one, is shaped by credentials and authority. Professors are very important. Doctors are never wrong, unless they’re doctors who question the party line. Experts must be trusted, because they are definitionally correct. They have a degree in that. And is there another bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the kitchen?
Margaret Brennan is America’s wine aunt. If you doubt this at all, watch her astonishingly dimwitted encounter last weekend with the longtime Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, who now runs the NIH. Bhattacharya has all the credentials, but public heterodoxy plus a job in the Trump administration take away all his credential points. The discussion is a witch-burning from the opening bell, and Brennan is fidgety and agitated in the presence of the witch.
As you watch, note above all that Brennan never says what she’s saying. She hints, she implies, she does the laziest guilt by association, but she never nails down any claim that she wants to suggest. Someone shot up the offices of the CDC, and he was influenced by “misinformation” — isn’t it bad that Trump, Trump, Trump?
Brennan doesn’t explicitly say that the shooter was influenced by any specific statement from any specific person. She takes two claims: The shooter was motivated by misinformation, and people in the Trump orbit spread misinformation. She then assumes that they’re both entirely true and connected by a bridge. (Bhattacharya, a gentleman to the point of being disadvantaged, never attacks her premise in a way that Marco Rubio or J.D. Vance would know to do immediately.) People questioned public health officials; isn’t that murder?
Every piece of underlying logic is insane. You can’t criticize a pharmaceutical corporation’s product, because someone might get shot. Government officials are not to be questioned, because someone might take it wrong and try to kill them. If anything bad happens in the second week of the month, this is proof that you should have remained silent and obedient in the first week of the month. You’re being dangerous!
Above all, Brennan is speaking for power and the status quo. She’s the voice of Albert Bourla and the GS-14. Weren’t you behaving very dangerously when you questioned the authorities? Incredibly, she carries this line through a conversation with a current authority without noticing that she’s eroding her own premise: How dare you question public health officials, Dr. NIH Director?
In the world of Wine Aunt Brennan, public health officials were right. They bravely fought the pandemic! No mistakes were made. No excesses occurred. They only wanted to stop the virus. To believe all of that in 2026, or at this point pretty much any of it, implies a level of self-hypnosis that brings to mind the Manchurian Candidate. Anthony Fauci is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
There’s nothing in there. She’s not thinking about any of it. No cognition occurs. There’s a fortress wall, and she’s firing at people who cross the moat, armed with some words that somebody wrote down on a piece of paper for her.
The great open secret about the leftist establishment girlboss is that none of them know anything, and none of them wish to know anything. When you meet with them, you hear their slogans, but they can’t answer a question or explain a premise to save their lives. A follow-up question slays them.
The Italian writer Luca Dellanna has succinctly described the descent into a culture of “ritual over merit,” a social world he calls a “mimetic society.” In that kind of society, he argues, people regard themselves as important and high-status because they can perform the status-defining rituals with exceptional uniformity. “In mimetic societies,” Dellanna writes, “conversations are rituals where turns are taken to reassure the other that he is performing well.”
This is exactly what Brennan is doing. A reference to “misinformation” is supposed to trigger a response that agrees about the importance of trusting the experts. It’s not an interview or a discussion; it’s an enforcement mechanism, like offering the secret handshake to see if the person on the other end of it knows how to return the signal.
Bhattacharya failed, because he thought. And Margaret Brennan won’t tolerate that kind of irresponsible behavior. We still don’t really care, Margaret.
