Trust the Silence, Dr. Fauci
Plus: Brazilian butt lifts, white grievance for grad students, and WNBA highlights
IT’S FRIDAY, JULY 31, 2026
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
A political party consumed by bitter infighting over a crucial primary election. The party establishment doing everything it can to stop the anti-establishment guy from winning, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
The candidate’s supporters want to “send a powerful message that all the money in the world cannot make up for the disgust” that regular voters feel for party elites. Their guy is not a bigot, they insist. He just tells it like it is. He fights.
Opponents think the “obnoxious, boorish, and insufferable grandstander” is doomed in the general. Some have vowed to never support him even if he wins the nomination. They refuse to “stand beside” a candidate whose extreme rhetoric has poisoned the “public dialogue.”
Good riddance, the anti-establishment scoffs. The movement will be “so much better and more popular when these people drop the act” and switch parties or launch a website called The Bastion.
Their guy, Abdul El-Sayed, has opened a comfortable lead over the establishment-backed Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. Voters head to the polls on Tuesday.
El-Sayed would make history as the first anti-capitalist, anti-anti-terrorist candidate to win a statewide Democratic primary despite having zero Nazi tattoos or credible rape allegations.
Francesca Hong, the left-wing lunatic running for governor of Wisconsin, is poised to become the second after trouncing the establishment-backed competition.
Democratic voters are mounting a Trumpian revolt just in time for the 2028 election, and it’s quite the spectacle. Hamas-adjacent, Mao-curious, anti-law and order. Daring to envision a government of, by, and for the over-credentialed, downwardly-mobile, upward-failing trust-fund technocrats.
In other words, white grievance. Let’s dispense with the folksy euphemisms and call this what it is. According to a recent poll, which showed El-Sayed leading Stevens by 16 points, the Trumpian candidate is winning white voters by 32 points and losing black voters by 33 points.
Giddy up.
TRUST THE SILENCE
On advice of counsel, Dr. Anthony Fauci refused to answer questions this week at a Senate hearing on the origins of the COVID-19 virus. In the words of another esteemed public servant: What difference, at this point, does it make?
Fauci, who already received a preemptive pardon from the person operating Joe Biden’s autopen, invoked his constitutional protection against self-incrimination more than 100 times. Quite the comedown for an “expert” once regarded as the preeminent voice of reason.
It would have been nice to hear Fauci’s thoughts on the matter. Perhaps he could explain: Why did he work so hard to discredit the (formerly racist, now broadly accepted) theory that the virus leaked from a lab? Still, seeing Fauci’s face in the news again was sufficient to remind us of the nonsense we endured in the name of “science.”
The hearing coincided with the release of excerpts from Fauci’s pandemic diary, which reveal a staggering—practically Obamaesque—level of self-regard.
“The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable,” Fauci wrote in May 2020 after the Washington Post published a “very flattering” article on its front page. “It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world.”
Weeks earlier, Fauci bragged to his diary about convincing New York and California to shut down schools, bars, and restaurants. On his way home from work, “several cars honked their horns and shouted ‘thank you’ out the window.”
Then came the dolls and prayer candles. Brad Pitt playing him on Saturday Night Live, followed by another episode where the doctor was pelted with bras. The horniness was out of control.
It’s not (entirely) Fauci’s fault that so many Democrats lost their minds, but he certainly deserves to be remembered as the leading scientific expert who helped demolish public faith in scientific expertise.
Watching him “testify,” I couldn’t help but think of an all-time quote from Ron DeSantis, an actual hero of the Covid era. “I’m just sick of seeing him,” the Florida governor said in 2022. “Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”
Still holds up.
DEADBEAT DEMOCRATS
A Democrat-run institution plagued by debt and dysfunction is more of a “dog bites man” story, but the Democratic National Committee is really struggling under chairman Ken Martin.
A New York Times report portrays Martin as a tinpot dictator under siege, describing the chairman as “increasingly isolated, gripped by the fear that he will lose his job and relying on a vanishingly small circle of people he trusts.” Last month, he threw his phone “at the desk of a junior aide.” Being a Democrat, it’s safe to assume he wasn’t aiming for the desk. Human resources got involved.
The DNC is $2 million in debt and has started asking vendors to delay invoices until after the midterms. Last year, a committee staffer wired $29,000 to an email scammer posing as Martin. They alerted the bank, but only recovered $7,000. Months later, the DNC put its headquarters up as collateral to obtain a $15 million line of credit.
Meanwhile, the RNC has almost $130 million in the bank.
Everywhere you look, governments and institutions run exclusively by Democrats are hemorrhaging money. California has spent $14 billion on a high-speed rail system that has yet to produce a single mile of operable track. The governor is running for president.
New York City “solved” its budget crisis thanks to pension gimmicks and a bailout from the state government. Zohran Mamdani will run for president eventually, after Democrats pack the Supreme Court to rule him eligible.
Fortunately, the DNC isn’t funded by taxpayers. It just helps elect the morons who want to raise your taxes and piss the money away.
ROAST ME, DADDY
If there’s one thing journalists love more than giving each other awards, it’s applauding themselves for having the courage to defend journalism under fire. They’re having a great week.
Most of us assumed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner had been canceled after another Bluesky user tried to kill the president. Apparently they just rescheduled it for this past weekend.
The journalists got to dress up and hand out trophies. In exchange, they had to sit there and listen to Donald Trump’s stand-up routine, which included one decent joke about CBS News and another line comparing CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender influencer and former Bud Light spokesman.
Outrage ensued. How dare Trump accuse Collins—a credentialed member of the free press—of bearing a likeness to a beautiful, courageous woman the New York Times once hailed as “vulnerable, hilarious ... horny.” MS NOW correspondent Vaughn Hillyard made the case that making fun of journalists was the moral equivalent of burning the American flag. “Journalism,” he said, “is a form of patriotism.”
Collins pulled herself together just in time to go on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and extol the virtues of the journalism profession. Her CNN colleague Jake Tapper promoted a clip from the show with not one, not two, but five applause hands and a queen emoji. “Crushed it!!!!!” he squealed.
To the extent there is a difference, professional Democrats were also in awe of Collins’s dauntless elegance. She wasn’t just a “brilliant journalist,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod explained, she was also an “admirable person.” Another longtime Democratic operative remarked that “her dignity and professionalism are extraordinary.”
Please keep these heroes in your thoughts and prayers.
PALATE CLEANSER
Dr. Adam Hamawy (D., N.J.) is on track to make history. If elected to the House in November, he would become the first member of Congress to testify on a terrorist’s behalf in federal court and perform a Brazilian butt lift (BBL).
Now, feast your eyes on these highlights from the WNBA All-Star Game. The talent is real!
HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND
Email: stiles@freebeacon.com
If you have friends, tell them to subscribe to the Stiles Section newsletter.
Send them here.











Section 1: The Democratic Primary Civil War (El-Sayed & The Anti-Capitalist Revolt)
The Democrats are having their own mini-civil war, and it is absolute comedy gold. Abdul El-Sayed is running away with the Michigan Senate primary, proving once and for all that the Democratic base has completely lost its mind. He’s set to make history as the first anti-capitalist, terror-apologist candidate to win a primary without needing a rap sheet or Nazi tattoos. These people scream "anti-capitalism!" from their $1,200 iPhones while sipping $8 oat milk lattes, convinced that destroying free markets will somehow fix their personal failures. You want to talk about anti-capitalism? Nothing says "I hate free enterprise" quite like living off mommy and daddy's trust fund while lecturing working-class Americans who actually pay taxes.
Section 2: Trust the Silence, Dr. Fauci (The King Ego)
Then we get to Anthony Fauci, the little king ego himself, wandering around like a retired emperor who can’t accept that nobody is bowing to his holy decrees anymore. The guy built a career out of micro-managing human interaction, commanding us to wear three masks while sitting alone in a kayak, and now he’s desperate for attention. He built an altar to his own ego out of television appearances, and the silence from the public now must be absolute torture for him. Seeing a narcissist realize that the world moved on and stopped treating his word as gospel isn't just satisfying—it’s public health in its purest form.
Section 3: The Brazilian Butt Lift Epidemic
Next up in the newsletter: cosmetic absurdities. We've reached a point in culture where people are literally risking fat embolisms and organ failure just to look like an over-inflated cartoon character on Instagram. The Brazilian Butt Lift is the ultimate monument to modern vanity—paying tens of thousands of dollars to take fat from your waist and stuff it into your backside so you can struggle to fit into airplane seats. It's the physical manifestation of brain rot: risking sudden death just so complete strangers on the internet can give you a digital thumbs-up. If that doesn't sum up the collapse of Western civilization, nothing does.
Section 4: White Grievance for Grad Students (The Academic Victim Complex)
Then there’s the academic wing of the outrage industry—grad students whining about systemic oppression because their hyper-niche, utterly useless PhDs in basket weaving won't pay off their $200,000 student loans. They spend six years over-analyzing micro-offenses in air-conditioned lecture halls, completely detached from real life, and then act shocked when the real world tells them their degree is worthless. It’s a specialized brand of victimhood where the most privileged kids on earth pretend they're living through a gulag because someone used the wrong pronoun or didn't appreciate their thesis on Victorian table manners.
Section 5: The WNBA Highlights (The Unspoken Reality)
And finally, the WNBA section. The media keeps trying to force-feed us WNBA highlights like it’s peak athletic performance, gaslighting the entire country into pretending the league isn't completely subsidized by the NBA just to stay solvent. We all know who actually generates the interest and brings the eyeballs—Caitlin Clark—and the moment you point out that simple, cold-hard economic truth, the outrage mob instantly labels you a racist, a sexist, and a bigot. They'd rather let the whole operation hemorrhage cash than admit that talent and draw power dictate success in professional sports, not ideological quota systems.
Wrapping Up the Week
If you don't break down and laugh at the sheer absurdity of this weekly circus, you'd end up staring at the wall in total despair. It’s a grim reality, but breaking it down with brutal honesty is the only way to send off the week with a smile—even if that smile hurts a little.
The prevalence of obesity has never been as high as it is at present. In this light, one wonders why it is thought to be beauty-enhancing to relocate fat surgically, particularly where death is not entirely out of the question.